January 28, 2023

"One of the sad facts about anti-Black racism is that Black people ourselves are not immune to its pernicious effects."

Writes Van Jones in "The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism" (CNN).
Society’s message that Black people are inferior, unworthy and dangerous is pervasive. Over many decades, numerous experiments have shown that these ideas can infiltrate Black minds as well as White. Self-hatred is a real thing. That’s why a Black store owner might regard customers of his same race with suspicion, while treating his White patrons with deference. 
Black people can harbor anti-Black sentiments and can act on those feelings in harmful ways. Black cops are often socialized in police departments that view certain neighborhoods as war zones. In those departments, few officers get disciplined for dishing out “street justice” in certain precincts — often populated by Black, brown or low-income people — where there is a tacit understanding that the “rulebook” simply doesn’t apply.... 
Back in 1989, the rap group NWA highlighted the problem in a classic hip-hop anthem, in which Ice Cube rapped: “But don’t let it be a Black and White (cop)/ Coz they’ll slam ya/ Down to the street top/ Black police showing out for the White cop.”...

Some people are over-reacting to this column and seem as if they were hoping that because the 5 police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are black, we can proceed directly to color-blindness. Too soon! Too easy! Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves.

193 comments:

gilbar said...

i knew there were 'white hispanics', who knew that where 'white blacks' too?
DAMN those whites!! they take over EVERYTHING!!!

Dave Begley said...

Tom Wolfe covered this in “Back to Blood.” Light skinned Blacks like the VP can be racist against darker skinned Blacks.

One of my fraternity brothers was a native of Guam. He hated Filipinos.

gilbar said...

That’s why a Black store owner might regard customers of his same race with suspicion,

oh! that's why? is it? it's not because the store owner knows what color most of his criminals are?

Enigma said...

Van Jones, please look up two concepts in the dictionary or even Wikipedia:

1. Tribalism
2. In-group vs. out-group relations

Humans and many animals follow simple primal survival rules: Take care of my own, and protect my own from external threats. "Racism" is a gross misinterpretation of the facts and artificially limits the concept to...skin color. Now, I must find a way to describe Asians who outcompete everyone else to get into state colleges as "White supremacists," as I need a bit more cognitive dissonance in my life.

rhhardin said...

Rejecting traditional values turns you into a savage. Who knew.

Jersey Fled said...

Black cops are often socialized in police departments that view certain neighborhoods as war zones.

And they’re not?

Blastfax Kudos said...

The best place to view anti-black racism is Africa itself. See it in the original place in its original form. Never assign to whites what is certainly a black invention. That's cultural appropriation.

mikee said...

Only whites can be racist, I am told.

Van Jones phrased his statement very carefully to avoid saying that the Black officers were being racist. They were just experiencing racism's pernicious effects (although differently from their victim's experience of racism, who arguably got the worst of the racism inherent in the system here). Racism, like climate change, is everywhere and can do anything!

Patrick Henry was right! said...

If it's not global warming, it's racism. All purpose explanation for everything!!!!! Almost as handy as the Veg-O-Matic!!!!

Iman said...

CNN and their despicable race-baiters can take a flying Roger at a rolling donut.

donald said...

Let’s DO not coddle ourselves. Van Jones knows the crime statistics. He’s not addressing or acknowledging them because it will establish that his entire statement here is garbage and that he is garbage for saying g it.

Wilbur said...

So, anti-Black racism turns black people against black people.

Sigh ... is there anything it can't do?

Mike Sylwester said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Breezy said...

Since we’re speculating here…. One of the cops said the victim was “on something”. Perhaps it’s not his skin color that provoked their incomprehensible and egregious action, but his actions provoked them, due to his state of mind. Not excusing the cops, just trying to understand how they could react so brutally. Skin color doesn’t add up, to me.

Sean said...

Chris Rock expressed thoughts on race issues pretty well.

"Black people are fine, but I hate n*****s."

"There isn't a white person in the audience who would want to trade places with me. And I'm rich!"

This incident shows that we have a policing problem in some communities that needs to be addressed.

Dave Begley said...

Tribalism is hard wired into our brains.

Tom said...

Let’s blame white people for a city that’s entirely controlled by democrats and particularly black democrats throughout the police and city government. This is Democrat on Democrat crime. Well over over half of America - the half that’s getting blamed - lives way outside those cities. In fact, over 52% of US counties didn’t have a murder last year. Guess who lives there? Mostly well armed white people. We’re getting blamed for what happens in cities we don’t live in and don’t control. Democrats control these cities and in some cases, have for a century. And these cities keep electing democrats. And, they keep getting the same results.

This crime was horrifying. I refuse to take the blame for it. Look in the mirror, Memphis. You’re doing this to yourself.

RideSpaceMountain said...

"And they're not?"

This. They are. It always gets a pat-answer yadda yadda racism yadda yadda poverty. It's not the economy, it's the culture stupid. Black neighborhoods, regardless of economic status, are behavioral sinks constantly headed towards a lowest common denominator. They are the definition of entropy and death spirals. And if it's currently not it will become one as soon as the blacks that don't want to participate in the inevitable vibrancy on the horizon leave for white neighborhoods, which they almost always do.

Not even black people that can choose where to live want to live around warzone blacks, just look at that grifter woman from Buy Large Mansions.

There will never be a solution to this. Ever. Behavioral sinks are baked into genetic and cultural pies and require catastrophic and apocalyptic change to undo. Essentially something will have to happen to the United States (and by extension) globally that changes all the rules of the game before black culture, black people, and black neighborhoods can break out of the mobius feedback loop they've been in since LBJ started his Great Society push.

Leland said...

The sad fact is the 5 police officers were fired and now facing criminal charges for their actions, yet rioters want to blame the whole of society by shouting "racism" when the rest of society is already holding the officers accountable. The rioters should be put in jail for promoting violence. Anti-cop isn't an answer either, because we can see how that is going in the places where law enforcement has been told to back off.

Paul said...

If you watch realty shows like "The First 48", "The Murder Tapes", "Interrogation Raw", and others, or even just read the newspaper in many states (easy to do online), you will see the preponderance of crime is caused by... blacks. Just a fact.

And with blacks making up just 18% of the population.. well do you see why people would think what they think?

That is not saying all blacks are criminals, or even most, but with drugs and gangs and dropping out of school early... in the cities many of the younger males do lean toward a life of crime.

Birches said...

What gilbar said.

Let's not forget the fact that everyone in Memphis is black: 65%. Less than a quarter of Memphis residents are white. There's no white people to impress.

Stop trying to make a race issue where there is none.

BUMBLE BEE said...

Now do Chicago. I used to enjoy the reports from Second City Cop. They have quite the body count there.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

How about we get Van Jones to recognize the dangerous Us vs. Them mentality that exists between black Americans and the Police; that Media Talking Asshol...er...Heads like him have helped to engender?

Oh Yea said...

So all the efforts we have made in affirmative action hirings weren’t the solution we were told?

Kevin said...

If you can't find racism in any situation, that's because of the patriarchy.

Old and slow said...

When you are on the progressive left, words can mean whatever you would like them to mean. They can also have different meanings at different times or situations. It is very convenient.

Bob Boyd said...

The goal of the anti-police movement is to increase federal control over local law enforcement. The narrative on this incident will be fashioned accordingly.

Spiros said...

What kind of racism? Is it "uncle Tom," "crab in a barrel" or "acting white."

Kevin said...

Too soon! Too easy!

Well then, I guess we can do away with the idea of having a police force that reflects the community.

Yet another "solution" from the left that won't be allowed to solve anything.

Another old lawyer said...

Finally, widespread protesting about black-on-black crime.

RideSpaceMountain said...

Modern American urbanism is the definition of reductio ad absurdum. It blatantly stares leftist liberals directly in the face for a staring contest they lose instantaneously. Their precious urban cores are getting so bad they're having to hire visigoths to police the visigoths and vandals as jailors for vandals because they refuse to acknowledge the problem is visigoths and vandals in the first place.

This is literally your shocked face? Really? That black police recruited to make up for other cops that long since saw the writing on the wall and refused to be thrown under a bus aren't far removed from the people they were hired to police?

Who do you plan to turn to next, Mexicans? Which lucky group of minority Americans get to police black warzones next, or do you plan to just let them kill each other and run rampage through your business districts?

Oh...they already do that. Yikes. Well....OK then.

boatbuilder said...

The inner city is a "war zone". And cops of all races are the soldiers who are asked to patrol it and protect us.

And the black storekeeper who mistrusts young black customers didn't learn that mistrust from "society." He lives there. It's a real thing.

You can debate about the causes, and whether it is fair or not. But black-on-black crime is real, pervasive and a huge problem. "Blame Whitey" is not the answer.

tim maguire said...

The pernicious beauty of conspiracy theories is that they can never be disproven because anything, literally anything, can be brought within the conspiracy.

Kai Akker said...

---Too soon! Too easy! Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves. [AA]

I'm confused, to borrow the feminine term for disagree.

What is it too soon for? Evaluating an incident on its facts?

Is that too easy? What makes that easy -- that we don't have to measure out a titre of tincture-of-racism and swirl it gently into the facts so as to be certain we change them into something they were not, on their own?

What reality is Althouse looking at straightforwardly, and not coddling herself?

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

wy did they kill Tyrie? What is the real story?

Yancey Ward said...

Sure, black people killing other black people is white people's fault.

Jones can go fuck himself sideways. How is that for a reaction?

jnseward said...

Or maybe the black store owner is just guilty of pattern recognition.

AMDG said...

Until society addresses the elephant in the room - that over 50% of crime is committed by black males under the age of 40 (around 4% or 5% of the total population - nothing will change.

When Jesse Jackson said “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” was he being racist or looking at percentages?

Rory said...

"Light skinned Blacks like the VP can be racist against darker skinned Blacks."

SNL's classic:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2m6cv0

John henry said...

Mussolini had his Black shifted squadrismo.

Biden and the demmies have their black shirted antifa

Same people same methods same goals

John Henry

JAORE said...

"Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves."

Well, there's a first time for everything.

iowan2 said...

I have been informed...NO Lectured that racism is about power, and Black don't have that power.

But it seems a city with Black leaders, and a police force led by Blacks, and a majority of Black officers, still suffers institutional racism.
Does this expose the lie of "lived experience"?

Mr Wibble said...

This isn't an issue of racism or white supremacy. That's just a smokescreen to avoid discussing the utter corruption of the Memphis PD and local government.

Robert Cook said...

"'Black cops are often socialized in police departments that view certain neighborhoods as war zones.'

"And they’re not?"


Depends on the neighborhood and the circumstances. Police can become as much aggressors to the citizens as are the criminals, and they can come to see no differences between the aggressors and citizens.

We were fighting a (baseless) war in Vietnam, supposedly to help the South fend off the aggression of the North, yet many of our troops came to view all Vietnamese as "gooks," worthy only of suspicion or contempt. The same occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, when "the enemy" looks and speaks just like "the friendlies," how can one discern a difference?

Police who are charged with protecting the citizens from criminal predators in minority neighborhood can easily come to see all residents in those neighborhoods as "skels" and "perps." This is probably a natural self-protective psychological process, but it must be resisted and dealt with, if the actual purpose is to help the citizens who are victims of aggressors. Too often, the purpose is simply to impose blanket domination on the area, without regard for who are the aggressors and who are not, as it removes from the occupiers (military or police) the difficulty of exercising discernment and judgement. The police become just a blunt tool of the authorities to "pacify" the areas where the hostiles operate (and often live).

chuck said...

Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves.

Sounds good. What, pray tell, is the reality here? Black on black violence isn't confined to the cops, it is a festering sore that no one, especially Democrats, wants to acknowledge. Or do anything about. It has been a growing problem since the 1960's.

Jake said...

Maybe skin color isn’t the problem.

Temujin said...

Well..I'll take a different position on this. Maybe a couple. I don't disagree with what Van Jones is saying- in parts. I do suspect that these police would have approached a White person with a different attitude, a different expectation. That's something that is baked into all of our consciousness. But it's borne out of real live examples. One after another after another of problems in the Black community. You can make arguments about the origin of these problems, but the reality is that in the urban Black community, there are troubles you don't see in a typical White community. And so cops- black or white- approach it with that history in their gut.

The other thing is this: In all businesses, all fields, there are weak hires. People who get hired because the company or business needed people. Bodies. And often, the best are not hired. The first there are hired. We do this in shoe stores, in restaurants. We hire idiots for Congress and Prez. We have 'bodies' taking space in all manner of the millions of government jobs. But there are some jobs where it's more obvious and far more dangerous to make a mistake. Some jobs, you cannot be allowed to hire just 'bodies' to fill a slot. Where they have to be the best of the best and the hiring process, as well as the training process, has to be a higher standard. These are jobs where a simple mistake can cause damage, or death. Astronaut. Pilot. Surgeon. Doctor. Police.

But we don't hire police with any standards. We have no bodies. And with the 'defund the police' movement, we have even fewer, and those in the job are under huge pressure. Short staffed against massive criminal activity, weaponry, and just flat-out scorn. We hire bodies. We lower our standards to fill slots. And in our most dangerous cities, we have people in positions that they should not be in, where any misjudgment means lives lost- on both or either side.

We have to raise pay for police to attract a better crop of applicants. I mean- who wants to do that job today? Who are we currently attracting to these police forces? Better pay. A stringent hiring procedure that has HIGH standards. Not based on race or gender. What a ridiculous concept for life and death hires. Better pay, higher hiring standards, and tougher training standards. Instead of lowering intellectual and physical standards to get more bodies of 'diverse' colors and sexual organs, how about raising all the standards for this segment of governmental job- one that can mean life or death- so that we get the best of the best manning that thin blue line. People of good judgement, sound character, who know how to act and react under stress.

We would expect nothing less from our surgeons. We need as much for those standing in the middle of the toughest spots in our society.

Anyway...that's my 2 cents.

gspencer said...

It is truly amazing the lengths to which the race-baiters will go to excuse blacks' anti-social, anti-intellectual behavior.

GatorNavy said...

Tribalism doesn’t explain why the Scorpion group was created in the first place, you need to follow the money. And in Memphis, it is tourist dollars. You can bet all of the city politicians were perfectly happy with the police being heavy handed right up until this incident.

gilbar said...

Tom said
In fact, over 52% of US counties didn’t have a murder last year. Guess who lives there? Mostly well armed white people.

this is EXACTLY the Problem! With all these well armed white people, How are gang bangers supposed to be able to easily rob and rape and rampage? or Maim or mutilate or murder?

With white people havin' so many guns, a black ain't got no options, but to strike other blacks!
If white people would throw away their guns, and go back to havin' their hot daughters goin' clubin'.. black folk could back to hitting THEM! instead of each other.

Sensible Gun Control.. It's What's Needed!! No hood wants to rob a house with an armed owner!

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

shorter message --
Black cops are not allowed to halt crime committed by blacks. Or - racism.

tim in vermont said...

It’s a class thing within a race. Ask Howard his opinion of trailer-trash Trump voters.

RigelDog said...

And when a white person is unreasonably assaulted by police, it's ???

tim in vermont said...

Look at how Chuck views other white people who vote differently than he thinks they should; is that racism or some kind of class snobbery? Trump is not a racist, for example, but Chuck’s purblind class hatred keeps him from seeing it.

Spiros said...

Maybe "class" is a better way to talk about these officers' behavior (which really was not that bad)? Middle class blacks are terrified of inner city communities (me too!) and their troubling behaviors. Glenn Loury admits: "We are afraid to go into these communities. We do not recognize these kids as us; the distance is great and difficult to bridge."

Gahrie said...

That’s why a Black store owner might regard customers of his same race with suspicion, while treating his White patrons with deference.

Or just maybe it's the storeowner's experience that most of the people who shoplift, rob and loot his store happen to be Black.

How many of those shoplifting flash mobs have been made up of White people?

What percentage of violent crime does a demographic that represents 5% of our population commit?

Even Jesse Jackson knew the truth.

Blastfax Kudos said...

Ridespacemountain said, "Who do you plan to turn to next, Mexicans? Which lucky group of minority Americans get to police black warzones next, or do you plan to just let them kill each other and run rampage through your business districts?"

They better not, Mexicans and Latinos generally hate blacks. In fact, and according to liberals themselves, everyone hates blacks. Whites hate blacks. Latinos hate blacks. Asians hate blacks. Indians hate blacks. Irish hate blacks. Africans hate blacks. Arabs hate blacks. Even Jews hate blacks. And now blacks hate blacks. It's funny because when you think about it, who doesn't hate blacks? White liberal politically left democrats apparently love blacks. Why is that?

Gahrie said...

Until society addresses the elephant in the room - that over 50% of crime is committed by black males under the age of 40 (around 4% or 5% of the total population - nothing will change.

Close. That's true for violent crime. For all other types of crime, White people commit the most offenses, which you would expect because they are 77% of the population.

Critter said...

I am so tired of the racism narrative. If Democrats did not think it helps them politically it would practically disappear.

I think everyone who charges racism should be required to tell us of the worst racist thing they have done. I bet most could not name anything beyond the phantom white privilege.

The demand for racism far outstrips the supply.

Robert Cook said...

"We have to raise pay for police to attract a better crop of applicants. I mean- who wants to do that job today?"

I think many who choose to become police are aggressive by nature, and this may influence their choice of occupation. After all, many people choose their occupations according to their innate character and interests. My younger brother told me years ago that many of the "bad kids" and bullies he knew in elementary school became police officers in the local police force when they grew up. (My brother was popular and athletic and was never a victim to bullies, so his observation was not colored by any lingering hostility to these people. He was probably even friendly with them in childhood and adulthood.)

Aggie said...

Thank you for noting 'Van Jones' at the very top, so that I could avoid reading it more quickly.

He's a racial polemicist masquerading as a pseudo-Marxist intellectual, and he always has been. Thugs come in all colors and badges, and this is a terrific example of that circumstance. Isn't it funny how race has come to be the common denominator in any social-trending conversation, as long as it's 'white' or 'black', narrative to follow?

Patrick Henry was right! said...

better not, Mexicans and Latinos generally hate blacks. In fact, and according to liberals themselves, everyone hates blacks. Whites hate blacks. Latinos hate blacks. Asians hate blacks. Indians hate blacks. Irish hate blacks. Africans hate blacks. Arabs hate blacks. Even Jews hate blacks. And now blacks hate blacks. It's funny because when you think about it, who doesn't hate blacks? White liberal politically left democrats apparently love blacks. Why is that?
Votes.

cfs said...

This was a "black on black" street fight beat-down. It happens daily, and is ignored, on the streets of democrat-controlled cities. The only difference in this one is that five of the thugs wore badges. They were "authorized" thugs.

BIII Zhang said...

As a society, we've decided that it's easier and cheaper to let some people be criminals. See the shoplifting laws of New York and San Francisco (or any George Soros-run state) for example, where it's now legal to shoplift up to $999 worth of goods and they will not prosecute you.

That will bring out the worst in people. Black or white. Cop or not.

We're going to have to see the results first, before we're going to change it though. And you are now seeing some of the results.

It takes Taxi Driver-levels of corruption in a city before the citizens will elect a Guliani to wash the streets.

Roy Lofquist said...

The perennial question, at least for my 80 years, has been "nature or nurture?". Thus for the phenomenon of black crime we are presented with two possible answers - blacks are genetically predisposed to be criminals or the leaders, culture setters, of the black community are evil incarnate. Either answer proves that you are a racist. This is known as "Catch 22".

Abdul Abulbul Amir said...

.
White supremacy, it's not just for white people anymore.

rhhardin said...

Black store owners aren't prejudiced, just using Bayes's theorem.

Cappy said...

Isn't he a communist?

stlcdr said...

The crime is racism.

Now what happened, again?

AZ Bob said...

What are the odds that those five Black cops, none of them light skinned, are white supremacists?

rhhardin said...

I think many who choose to become police are aggressive by nature

You'd think aggression would go with police clients.

wild chicken said...

also, we need more black cops

Joe Smith said...

I was told by blacks that all the melanin made you superior humans?

Not correct?

The Democrats have sure made your lives miserable.

First keeping you as slaves. Then killing you with the KKK. And then Jim Crow laws for good measure.

How's that 'War on Poverty' working out?

Joe Smith said...

"There isn't a white person in the audience who would want to trade places with me. And I'm rich!"


Completely untrue.

A smart black person has tremendous advantages in modern US society...

Smilin' Jack said...

“Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves.”

People who do that get canceled.

No one of consequence said...

Temujin said a lot of what I was thinking.

Jones seems to be saying that (white) racism is now so intrinsically a part of the world, that all non-white people are suffering from it, whether they are the (non-white) victims of police beating or the (non-white) police giving the beating.

Jones also says, “It’s hard to imagine five cops of any color beating a White person to death under similar circumstances.” And his conclusion is, “while racial integration is important for basic fairness and opportunity, it is not a panacea against police abuse.”

Taken together, I can say that I agree with Jones that police abuse is a terrible problem that needs to be addressed. I am less persuaded that oversight and strict punishment alone is sufficient, and believe that better training (and maybe better hiring standards) are also necessary (and still may not be sufficient).

But if you go back to Jones’ original point, which Ann quoted, no training or oversight or punishment of police abuse will matter to Jones or his own in-group. While Jones might acknowledge: ”It’s a sad fact, but one that’s old as time itself: People often oppress people who look just like them. The vast majority of human rights abuses are committed by people who look exactly like the people they are abusing.” He knows that all races have oppressed. But he is blaming racism (whites) for not only this murder, but for all abuses, self-hatred, or inferior thoughts any non-white in society experiences. For Jones and his in-group, it will forever and always be the fault of whites when things go wrong for non-whites.

So, how exactly should we “look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves?”

William said...

More elephants than rooms: This beat down looks worse than any previously recorded. It reflects poorly on the police officers involved. Is it further a reflection on police officers in general or on blacks in general? Why is it useful to extend such blanket disapproval to police but not to blacks?......Whites are constantly being reminded to check their inherent racism. Okay. Racism is a thing. It's not a construct of left wing politicians. But somewhere along the way shouldn't blacks be asked to reflect on their own deficits. This impulsive, wanton violence is a thing in the black community. It's not a construct of white racists....The way Van Jones projects criticism away from the black community in which these officers were recruited and onto police and whites in general is a dodge and a scam.

Lazarus said...

Some people are over-reacting to this column and seem as if they were hoping that because the 5 police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are black, we can proceed directly to color-blindness. Too soon! Too easy! Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves.

I'm trying to puzzle out how much of that is irony and how much is sincere. I don't see any reason to overreact, because I don't see much reason to react to what Van Jones is saying. It just seems like more of the rhetorical boilerplate that we've been hearing for 60 years.

Is immediately assuming racism is the reason for all abuses that much of an improvement over denying that racism exists? Racism exists, but is it really the reason for this particular outrage? Isn't it simplistic -- or a diversionary tactic -- to pretend that it is?

I would agree that some people don't want to talk about the causes of police brutality or crime or any social problem, but it also seems clear that people who incessantly talk about the "root causes" of crime or police brutality or poverty or urban blight or illegal immigration or any other problem don't really do or want to do anything about those problems. Talk of root causes is often a way of opposing possible solutions and keeping one's grift going.

Ampersand said...

The problem I see with commentary on these issues is that nobody, whether left, right, or centrist, seems to have a realistic strategy that credibly promises to reduce both the reality and perception of racism.
The only potential cure seems to be the passage of time, somehow diminishing the incentives for bad behaviors.

Tina Trent said...

Coddle? Nonsense. We have had black police and black Police Chiefs running most urban forces for decades now. Many decades.

Most crime is intraracial, with one glaring exception: black offenders commit vastly more crimes against whites. But more to this topic, 60% of known murderers are young black males, who are only 5% of the population. 58.1% of murder victims are young black males too. Of the unknown murderers, there are overwhelming reasons to assume most are black, so that 60% of murders committed by black youth is likely far higher. In many cities, the homicide rate committed by blacks rose more than 100% over the last four years.

Like many of these cities, the homicide rate in Memphis dropped slightly between 2021 and 2022 but is still higher than a few years ago. Meanwhile, other crimes have skyrocketed. Last year, there were 303 homicides in that small city, almost all committed by black males.

None of this excuses the horrific actions of those police in Memphis. But it explains it better than behaving as if black people can't possibly think for themselves and see the body count in their own communities as something other than the consequence of innocent whites.

The better focus here -- and I think the (nearly all black) local authorities are handling this awful murder relatively well -- is on every one of those 303 murdered, plus the thousands more carjacked, shot, assaulted, raped, burgled, and otherwise predated. That's real context, not transhistorical race-baiting garbage. And it is the way forward, not backwards.

Backwards only piles the bodies higher, nearly all black ones killed by other black males. Who the hell wants that, besides animals profiting from it like Van Jones?

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Cook - that might be somewhat true - on far the margins. However, most Police officers are inspired by a desire to serve and protect.
They do a good job and they do not deserve the condescending ignorance and abusive BS from the "defund the police" left.

ndspinelli said...

I know few here are friends w/ cops and probably don't know any black cops. I do. Black cops get more shit from black thugs than many white cops get.

Lars Porsena said...

Blogger Robert Cook said...
"We have to raise pay for police to attract a better crop of applicants. I mean- who wants to do that job today?"

Who wants that job today? It's the kind of work those 'other' people do.

Jersey Fled said...

Anti-cop isn't an answer either, because we can see how that is going in the places where law enforcement has been told to back off.

The Left solves every problem by making it worse.

RideSpaceMountain said...

"nobody, whether left, right, or centrist, seems to have a realistic strategy that credibly promises to reduce both the reality and perception of racism."

Allow me to slow your roll. There is no realistic strategy because there is no realistic strategy. In fact, and I'm sure most would agree, incidents like this increase racism. Even moreso, Saint Obama of Trayvon Martin was the worst president in the history of racial relations in American history, an opportunity of epic proportions for black people to speak frankly about racial issues to themselves and others that was not only missed, but was triumphantly stillborn.

There is no realistic strategy. Forces are at work that do not want one. Racial animosity is useful even though every passing day reveals it may be more and more justified by one party against another.

Racism is real. It exists. It will always exist. The world was, is, and will be racist. Colorblind societies are a myth. They have always been a myth. You can be a harmonious racist society, or you can be an antagonistic one, but all societies at all times, are racial societies.

Mike Sylwester said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Shouting Thomas said...

Once rich white women (feminists) declared that they were “oppressed just like blacks under Jim Crow,” blacks were fucked.

The feminist fake victim act exists on the foundation of bigotry mania. New forms of bigotry must constantly be invented to support the feminist drama queen act. First it was gays, since gay men are the favorite kink of rich white feminist women.

So, nothing can be done to solve the problems of blacks. The solutions are fathers as the head of the household and traditional religious observance. Those solutions are forbidden because they would effectively expose and demolish the fake victimhood of feminism.

So blacks are fucked. Young black men will continue to live without the direction of fathers so that rich white women can pretend to victimhood, manipulate white men, and promote their kink partners, gay men.

Mostly, I don’t bother with this shit or care any more. A man can’t fight rotten spoiled brat white women, as Jordan Peterson has noted.

khematite said...

Van Jones isn't saying anything very different from what CCNY psychology professor Kenneth B. Clark reported with regard to the "doll tests" with white and black children that he conducted in the late 1940s. He concluded that many black children, at a very young age, had already internalized a sense of racial inferiority and even a significant degree of self-hatred. The US Supreme Court relied upon the evidence of those tests in its unanimous 1954 opinion, Brown v. Board Education, that the "separate but equal" doctrine announced a half-century earlier, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) could not continue to stand.

Zavier Onasses said...

Society’s message that Black people are inferior, unworthy and dangerous is pervasive. Over many decades, numerous experiments have shown that these ideas can infiltrate Black minds as well as White.

If that be true, and if it be not a good thing, then the first corrective action should be to eliminate the racism that pervades our Government. Eliminate the Government requirement that individuals be classified by "race."

Yes, this would eliminate the jobs of tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Government "workers." But perhaps it is a sacrifice that should be made.

Robert Cook said...

"And when a white person is unreasonably assaulted by police, it's ???"

Police brutality.

Mike Sylwester said...

Black resist arrest much more than Whites do.

Here is one study showing that Blacks resist arrest ten times more frequently in San Diego.

That ratio -- about ten times more frequently -- seems about right as a general rule of thumb.

Doug said...

Self-hatred is a real thing. That’s why a Black store owner might regard customers of his same race with suspicion, while treating his White patrons with deference.


Is he kidding? The black store owner is working in his own self interest, and the interest of his business.

Mark said...

Hey RideSpaceMountain ...

"Even moreso, Saint Obama of Trayvon Martin was the worst president in the history of racial relations in American history"

Obama did worse than what happened during the Trail of Tears? I could go on, but your unsubstantiated claim is quite ignorant of history.

That said, par for the course here to turn this into political partisan war.

n.n said...

Tribalism, racism, sexism, political congruence ("=") are derived from diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry) that is common in class-disordered religions and first-order forcings of Inequity, Exclusion, and Distancing.

Aggression may be forced by frustration. For example, officers in sanctuary states, bag limits, DIE inculcation, nations without borders, immigration reform, etc.

Hutu vs Tutsi. Kenya elite vs deplorables.

Mandela's Xhosa vs Zulu prompted an apartheid solution in South Africa to mitigate social progress. Natural resources, including diamonds, prompted an invasion of the African state.

#HateLovesAbortion and other wicked solutions.

hombre said...

Perhaps black cops and other black people are aware that a majority of the violent crime in America is attributable to young black men. Is concern about being added to their list of victims the "anti-black racism" of which Jones speaks?

n.n said...

Once rich white women (feminists) declared that they were “oppressed just like blacks under Jim Crow,”

Feminists/masculinists vs women and men with the "burden" of collateral damage. And NOW (pun intended), the transgender spectrum (e.g. homosexual, neo, quasi, sim) seeking personal affirmation through medical, surgical, and/or psychiatric corruption of girls and boys, too.

Krumhorn said...

Robert Cook’s assessment:

We were fighting a (baseless) war in Vietnam, supposedly to help the South fend off the aggression of the North, yet many of our troops came to view all Vietnamese as "gooks," worthy only of suspicion or contempt. The same occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, when "the enemy" looks and speaks just like "the friendlies," how can one discern a difference?

This is particularly true when folks who look and speak just like the friendlies use that very tactical advantage to blend in to do you harm. Cook has apparently never experienced that deadly risk. Suddenly, an IED goes off, and half your squad is now dead or maimed. The friendlies don’t seem so friendly.

Lefties often don’t get the most basic concepts, and reality is a fevered dream.

- Krumhorn

Political Junkie said...

I am not hopeful about poor black and working class blacks in America. I shall call these groups "Rap Class".

"Rap Class" dominate football and basketball.

Why? Possible answers are:

1."Rap Class" work harder than other races.
2. Other races choose not to participate in football and basketball in meaningful percentages.
3."Rap Class" are inherently or genetically advantaged.
4."Rap Class" cultural choices.

Genetic predisposition cannot be spoken in public.

If one posits "Rap Class" dominate football and basketball because of outworking other groups, then a natural follow up is "various tests show blacks score lower than other groups (Asians, Whites, Hispanics for SAT and IQ, for example), is that because "Rap Class" does not work hard enough in reading, match, science, etc." That argument cannot be raised in public.

Bottom line - Culture matters. When a white person is socialized with a black person that has a superior family tree over generations, it causes the white to contemplate and ask why that is. The only answer I have seen in my life is culture...the choices people and family make in their life and over generations.

IMO, "Rap Class" has proportionately worse values and makes proportionately worse choices (fleeing police, for example). Choices people make having profound affect....definition of Conservativism.

Krumhorn said...

Tina Trent - as she so often is….directly on target!

- Krumhorn

Butkus51 said...

lets not forget the fact that this blog entry was...........written by a white person.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Biden having secret docs at his home in delaware and black cops killing a black suspect are not similar in any way.

Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves.

Or... it appears like anything you say can only be used against you.

RideSpaceMountain said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
RideSpaceMountain said...

Hey Mark...

The Cherokee were not citizens during the trail of tears. Jackson was not their president. They were a separate nation, with their own leadership, and their own representation, some of whom chose not to head West.

I'm very very sorry I spoke ill of Saint Obama in your presence. I will ensure trigger warnings to protect your historically murky assertions in future comments.

I can, and will, do better.

Kai Akker said...

---I'm trying to puzzle out how much of that is irony and how much is sincere. [Lazarus]

Yes. I took it as sincere -- the final paragraph of her post with some parting observations and then, with those exclamation points, a bit of a crie de coeur. What specifically Althouse meant in there, I don't know for sure.

But, to liberals, it is always "too easy" to look at the facts and draw logical conclusions. Those conclusions will run counter to liberal fantasies far, far too often. Such clear conclusions must be smokescreened away with "root causes" and other nebulous speculations whose entire purpose is to perpetuate the current events, evil as they may be, so that they can be used as propaganda for "liberal" political projects.

It is always "too soon" to draw logical conclusions from events because it might hinder the construction of the "liberal" Utopia. Once the Utopia is achieved, then it will be okay to make honest observations because the world will be so perfect that there will be nothing to criticize or condemn. "Liberals" know this and they are only doing it in this dishonest way for our own good.

Michael K said...

Some jobs, you cannot be allowed to hire just 'bodies' to fill a slot. Where they have to be the best of the best and the hiring process, as well as the training process, has to be a higher standard. These are jobs where a simple mistake can cause damage, or death. Astronaut. Pilot. Surgeon. Doctor. Police.

Meanwhile, medical schools and specialty training programs are discarding the "Merit" standard and going for "bodies" as long as they are black. Airlines are doing the same.

The argument that the best candidates are avoiding the police jobs is valid. Cook writes about "brother's theory" but that is typical leftist cant. Black cops are given more guff by blacks and respond accordingly. Why in the world did that kid resist and run? I wonder but am probably the only one to do so.

Obama did a lot to increase racism and he did it for selfish reasons. He decided more racism would mean more black Democrat votes and those vote counters in Atlanta and Philadelphia in 2020 were predominately black.

The teachers' unions are doing their share to keep blacks ignorant and at the bottom of society.

FullMoon said...

Patrick Henry was right! said...

If it's not global warming, it's racism.
.

I blame the parents.

hombre said...

Cook: "We were fighting a (baseless) war in Vietnam, supposedly to help the South fend off the aggression of the North, yet many of our troops came to view all Vietnamese as "gooks," worthy only of suspicion or contempt. The same occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, when "the enemy" looks and speaks just like "the friendlies," how can one discern a difference?"

Cook knows all this because he was there. Right?

JAORE said...

"I think many who choose to become police are aggressive by nature, and this may influence their choice of occupation."

I suspect what Cookie knows about cops is through headline news.

I know lots of cops. Black cops and white cops. College educated cops and those that worked their way up the ranks. Officers and lower rank cops. Currently serving cops and retired cops. There are, and were, cops in my immediate family.

Change "aggressive" to "protective" and you are closer to the reality I know.

Krumhorn said...

Some people are over-reacting to this column and seem as if they were hoping that because the 5 police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are black, we can proceed directly to color-blindness. Too soon! Too easy! Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves.

Very enigmatic here, Ann. Hard to tease out your point. I agree completely with your last sentence, but it’s entirely possible that your straightforward reality looking is from a very different point in space than mine. The lefties are always braying about insisting on having a difficult conversation, but they don’t mean that. They mean we should sit quietly and listen to their braying. The difficult conversation should focus on the points Tina Trent made above, and I would throw in a few paragraphs about the concept of baby mommas.

- Krumhorn

Michael K said...

That said, par for the course here to turn this into political partisan war.

Lefty Mark wants only political wars that his side wins. I have more sympathy, historically, for the bell beaker people, who were overwhelmed and vanished with the IndoEuropean invasion. The IndoEuropeans invented the wheel and domesticated the horse, so they had a similar superiority that 18th century Europeans had over the Cherokee. The American Indians never invented the wheel and the horse was extinguished by their ancestors. It was only reintroduced by the Spanish invaders.

Lefty Mark resembles the Greenies who want to do away with modernity.

J Severs said...

Mao's famines soon to be blamed on white racism.

Ray - SoCal said...

Julie Kelly is reporting possibly 4 deaths caused by police brutality on Jan 6

And there are stories of prison brutality for those in jail, done over 2 years, without trial.

Guess the race of the perpetrators…

Robert Cook said...

"Cook writes about 'brother's theory' but that is typical leftist cant."

Ha! Except my brother isn't a leftist. He's a right-winger and a Trump-supporter.

n.n said...

Albinophobia.

Alexisa said...

coddle ourselves? We need to stop coddling blacks. You treat them like they're retarded children.

Did you know some African nations have started to refuse aide, even from the UN ? And not because the UN is full of corrupt pedophiles (which is true) but because it was killing the heart and soul of their people. They would rather die than become wards of state.

they didn't come to this conclusion on a lark, this came from direct experience over several decades.

imagine that every time you give a little black
boy a condescending pat o. the head, you are robbing him bit by bit of the self-respect he needs to succeed in life.

---

"The only potential cure seems to be -

No no you're over-complicating it. To end racism simply kill every last Marxist you can find. I promise you, that will reduce racism by 90% and the rest will take care of itself.


You don't mind, do you Cook? you're doing this to save humanity to save the world, no doubt you would be honored to dive on this grenade

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

A little over a year ago - the Marshall fire destroyed over 1000 homes, killed 2 people and countless pets.
The wind and the dryness that day were ... I cannot explain. Fierce, punishing. relentless... the darkened sky looked like WWIII.
x1000

The church I attend was right on the line. The fire crept up the edge of the lot. (even made CNN) The church stepped up and did tremendous charitable work in the community to aid the grieving and help those who lost homes. Seven church members lost homes as well. The entire church was opened to outside help as a staging area - and some were allowed to treat the building as their home for many months. (among other things)

A few weeks ago - close to the one year anniversary of the fire - several members stood up to talk about it. Each with their own perspective and trauma. Trauma that still remains as a daily battle. One person, a local fire fighter who happens to be a woman, stood up to talk. She explained
how she and her co-workers at the station received all sorts of gift cards and support. She said they didn't need the gift cards - so they collected all of them and gave them to the people who lost everything. Local children from many local schools brought hand drawn artwork as a "thanks" - and the firehouse is still, to this day, papered with them.

She mentioned that during the fire, she was on the front lines aiding the evacuations. Literally running from house to house as the fire jumped and spread and devoured with relentless speed. Also on the front lines were police officers. She was there with them. In fact - she said that the police officers showed amazing bravery as they were often the ones charged with rounding up evacuees and going back for more under extremely dangerous conditions. She noted clearly how it saddened her that the fire-fighters got all the thanks and accolades - and yet- no one really stepped up to thank the local police.

Alexisa said...

coddle ourselves? We need to stop coddling blacks. You treat them like they're retarded children.

Did you know some African nations have started to refuse aide, even from the UN ? And not because the UN is full of corrupt pedophiles (which is true) but because it was killing the heart and soul of their people. They would rather die than become wards of state.

they didn't come to this conclusion on a lark, this came from direct experience over several decades.

imagine that every time you give a little black
boy a condescending pat o. the head, you are robbing him bit by bit of the self-respect he needs to succeed in life.

---

"The only potential cure seems to be -

No no you're over-complicating it. To end racism simply kill every last Marxist you can find. I promise you, that will reduce racism by 90% and the rest will take care of itself.


You don't mind, do you Cook? you're doing this to save humanity to save the world, no doubt you would be honored to dive on this grenade

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

If you listen to the latest Taibbi Kirn installment my comment above will start to make sense.

These stories are part of a much larger pattern that has become engrained in our social/political makeup.

There used to be a saying I don't hear much anymore. "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining." Some people, (instead of saying most people) have convinced themselves that without that piss "democracy dies in darkness" or worse.

Chest Rockwell said...

This post needs a Clayton Bigsby tag.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

A few years ago, A local police officer named Eric Tally, attempted to stop a mass shooter at a local grocery store. He took a bullet and died.

The shooter killed 10 people, including this brave police officer. Turns out, as I watched the funeral, he was loved by the community and his fellow officers.
The shooter and his family were immigrant brought here during the Obama administration. The shooter never assimilated and was a local bully in high school. Beat the crap out of an unsuspecting fellow student, after losing a wrestling match. (This bully supposedly under the watch of the FBI) The useless and corrupt FBI - once again. The bully ended up killing complete strangers.
In any case - turned out the shooter hated Donald Trump and said so on social media. The local and national press quickly dropped the story.

No rioting as a result. The media(D) control the rioting - if it's needed.

takirks said...

I guarantee you one damn thing... You put Van Jones's sorry ass out on the street as a beat cop? Make him stay there, day after day, no relief?

Come back in ten years, and you'll find he's a very changed man, and probably racist as all hell against other blacks.

That's the sad truth of the matter, right there: The primary driver of a lot of racism isn't outsiders just looking in at black America and deciding that they're bad because they're different. What does it is constant, consistent exposure to the reality of "black culture" at its absolute worst. Get up every morning, knowing that because you live near blacks, that you're going to find your shit stolen and/or vandalized, listen to the sirens of the cop cars every night, deal with the rampant threat against your life, liberty, and property?

You'll wind up racist, too. That's the sad fact of it all. Blacks are pretty much their worst enemies, and the first thing a successful black does is get the f*ck away from other blacks... Go look where Van Jones lives; it ain't in a majority-black neighborhood, now is it? Bastard knows better, but his lifestyle depends on two things: Not fixing what's obviously wrong with black America, and making bank off of "white guilt".

Original Mike said...

"Blogger Shouting Thomas said..."Once rich white women (feminists) declared that they were “oppressed just like blacks under Jim Crow,” blacks were fucked."

That was my thought back when it started (though I would have put it more delicately). The victimization bandwagon has been truly destructive for society.

Doug said...

The elite of Memphis will find some white cop who was involved in the training off these cover killers, and he will do prison time too.

Yancey Ward said...

It will interesting to learn in which jurisdiction the trials of the five cops occurs. I imagine it will take place in Memphis proper. So, any predictions on how a Memphis jury is going to decide this case? What will be different, I suspect, is that it will be the prosecutors who might want to move for a change of venue, and the defense fighting to keep in Memphis.

Peglegged Picador said...

Jesus, your audience is more frightening than I realized. We see this in the disability community a good bit too. When Becca Meyers was kept out of the Paralympics a couple years ago because the US Olympic Committee wouldn't make reasonable accommodations, I don't think any of her fellow Paralympians spoke out in support of her (and some were loudly spouting ableist trash against her).

Original Mike said...

"Some people are over-reacting to this column and seem as if they were hoping that because the 5 police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are black, we can proceed directly to color-blindness."

I was just hoping it would tamp down the rioting.

L Day said...

Jason Whitlock thinks this particular beating is yet another example of the terrible price paid for the destruction of the black family and the absence of fathers in young black men’s lives. That, to him, it looked exactly like any gang of young black men beating another young black man to death.

NMObjectivist said...

I am a white male and never in my life has it occurred to me to run away from a policeman under any circumstances.

Quaestor said...

Racism is the answer to all questions, except when it's climate change.

loudogblog said...

What I object to is the double standard. I can't comment on this case because I don't know any of the facts, but there have been many situations where minorities expressed obvious racism against white people but it's usually dismissed by people saying that minorities can never be racist against white people.

Any person of any race can be racist against any race, even their own.

Remember that Chappelle skit about the blind black guy who was a Klansman and hated black people?

john mosby said...

I’ve long advocated the Janissary Project.

In the Ottoman Empire, Janissaries were taken as boys from the subject peoples: Greeks, Armenians, Slavs, Africans, etc.

They were taken to Istanbul and put thru a program that combined Boys Town with West Point and a seminary.

They emerged more Turkish and Muslim than the actual Muslim Turks, with a classical, technical, and military education.

The Janissaries were the most elite soldiers of the Ottoman Empire, and, just like West Point grads here in the 19th century, also were called upon as civil engineers, governors, and administrators.

They were technically slaves but they ended up running the place. Their one restriction was that they could never return to their countrry of origin.

I would support a voluntary Janissary program in the hood, barrio, trailer park, Hmong ghetto, wherever - anyplace there is generational poverty.

Tell parents they can sign their kid over for a free education thru college, taking place in the remote heartland - just like Boys Town. The kid pays the education back by serving in the military, civil service, police/fire, maybe some charities. Or in industries where we currently rely on H1B’s.

The catch is you (and your dysfunctional neighborhood) never see the kid again.

I bet a lot of single mums would send their kids to be Janissaries.

JSM

Quaestor said...

Demogogs always reason simply to influence simple minds. What's the problem? Doesn't matter, the solution is ______.

In 1789 the answer was Louis XVI! In 1849 the answer was das Kapital! In 1917 it was Nicolas II! In 1933 it was die Juden!. Now it's fifty percent more complex.

RigelDog said...

Robert Cook answers my question:
"And when a white person is unreasonably assaulted by police, it's ???"

Police brutality.}}}}}

Sure it's police brutality. The question being, why is it racism when a black suspect is brutalized, but mere police brutality when a non-POC is brutalized?

madAsHell said...

Tyre Nichols!?!?

Was George Floyd unavailable?

Dave Begley said...

No one has commented on it, but how could those cops be so stupid? They were wearing cameras!

Gahrie said...

Obama did worse than what happened during the Trail of Tears? I could go on, but your unsubstantiated claim is quite ignorant of history.

What do the Trail of Tears, slavery, Jim Crow and the Japanese Internment all have in common?

Lars Porsena said...

Cook: "We were fighting a (baseless) war in Vietnam, supposedly to help the South fend off the aggression of the North, yet many of our troops came to view all Vietnamese as "gooks," worthy only of suspicion or contempt. The same occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, when "the enemy" looks and speaks just like "the friendlies," how can one discern a difference?"

Again, those troops like the police, are those 'other' people who seem to end up in those positions where life and limb are at risk. Those brutes need constant oversight by their moral and mental betters.

walter said...

Van Jones could find anti-b/Black racism in an all ginger fracas.
That's how insidious it is!!

ccscientist said...

Black cops are more likely to fire their gun. More racist? Assigned to worse neighborhoods? More impulsive?

Tomcc said...

It's not about race, it's about behavior. There's a subculture- I'll call it 'thug' culture or 'street' culture that is antithetical to normal social behavior. There's no respect for other people or their property. It's not just confined to young black men and cops have to deal with it every day, trying to intercede on behalf of people that just happen to live in its midst.

Original Mike said...

"No one has commented on it, but how could those cops be so stupid? They were wearing cameras!"

Wondering that myself. Must not have been the brightest bulbs.

n.n said...

Racism is the answer to all questions, except when it's climate change

And pro-Life. The audacity of depriving women, I think, of performing human rites.

minnesota farm guy said...

@ Gahrie OMG they were all driven by Democrats. You can't deny history you can only ignore it!

Narr said...

My wife is involved with a heritage group here (NWEuro) whose annual event scheduled for tonight has been canceled due to threats made against the facility--threats reported by the MPD, who told them this morning.

Interesting times.

Original Mike said...

Blogger Alexisa said..."coddle ourselves? We need to stop coddling blacks. You treat them like they're retarded children."

It seems to work (at least from the prospective of liberal democrats). How else to explain the decades long dominance of democratic administrations regardless of their complete failure to improve the lot of their citizens?

Sebastian said...

Sympathy to the victim and his family etc. etc.

But it seems that one can prevent the violent application of the apparently outrageous anti-black racism of black officers in a racist majority-black city run by racist Democrats by not violating any laws and, if one does, following orders peacefully and to the letter.

Jupiter said...

"That’s why a Black store owner might regard customers of his same race with suspicion, while treating his White patrons with deference."

Which is pretty amazing, when you consider that white people constantly shoplift and rob them, while Black people never do those things.

Maynard said...

Racism is the answer to all questions, except when it's climate change.

Wrong!

Jane Fonda says it is all connected to racism.

Aught Severn said...

Remember that Chappelle skit about the blind black guy who was a Klansman and hated black people?

Clayton Bigsby, one of Chappelle's iconic sketches in my opinion. I guess poor Clayton is no longer the only black white supremacist...

Steven said...

Black cops are often socialized in police departments that view certain neighborhoods as war zones.

This would be because certain neighborhoods are war zones.

There were 6.5 police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, per 2022 Memphis homicide. There were 298.1 police officers in London per 2022 London homicide. If you want the force in Memphis to be socialized to behave like they're police in London instead of vulnerable soldiers in a war zone, you need to expand the Memphis PD until the ratio of officers to murders is similar to that of London.

Michael McNeil said...

The American Indians never invented the wheel and the horse was extinguished by their ancestors.

The latter is true — though it happened some 10,000 years back, after the end of the ice age, accomplished by (uncomprehending) hunters trying to feed their families. Note that our own ancestors of that time (if “we” are of European or Asian descended peoples) also exterminated many large animals (“megafauna”) of Eurasia, such as mammoths and mastodons and numerous others. (So — as the I Ching puts it — no blame.)

The former assertion, however (that the American Indians never invented the wheel), is false. Wheeled toys are known from the Classic era of Mexican archaeology, showing that they (some of them) were clearly familiar with the principle — whose most important element, arguably, was not the round wheel (rolling on logs had been known for ages) but the axle.

The problem with putting the wheel to economic and military use by the Mexican Indians was lack of any sizable beasts of burden (such as the aforementioned, long-extinct horse, while the range of bison did not extend so far south as Mexico) to pull the Indians' carts and chariots. Thus, it's no surprise that they failed to find a reason to do so.

Not to speak of the fact (as archaeologist Stuart Fidel has observed in his fascinating book Prehistory of the Americas) that Mexico together with Peru as centers of urban civilization in the Americas lagged behind Eurasia/Africa in their civic and technological development by some 4,000 years.

Thus, when Europeans entered the American continents it was as if they were facing the ancient Sumerians in war.

Lilly, a dog said...

Mo money fo Ben Crump. But how many black saints will fit on his Mount Cashmore?

Mea Sententia said...

This notion that a society sends messages to people is a strange one, the more I ponder it. A person can send a message to another person, but a society doesn't send messages. People inhabit a certain place and time, and they perceive things, rightly or wrongly, about themselves. It's too convenient to blame society.

It made me think back to what Margaret Thatcher said about society: "..they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families..." She had the better approach to look at the individuals and the families they are embedded in.

Goju said...

John Mosby, weren't the Janissaries all eunuchs?

The immediate problem with your proposition is that it does nothing to address the destruction of the black family. You are just going to end up with an ever increasing number of youth being turned over to the govt. And that is going to result in an increase in national aggression. All those soldiers have to do something to justify their jobs.

Doug said...

I bet a lot of single mums would send their kids to be Janissaries.

I bet a lot of single mums depend on their drug dealing sons for luxury items and are not at all bothered by living the thug life.

mccullough said...

The inner cities of the 100 most populous cities are basically Black Appalachia. Black Appalachia is more violent than White Appalachia. And way more visible.

effinayright said...

Gahrie said...
Obama did worse than what happened during the Trail of Tears? I could go on, but your unsubstantiated claim is quite ignorant of history.

What do the Trail of Tears, slavery, Jim Crow and the Japanese Internment all have in common?
**************

More simple-minded bullshit from Simplicimus himself.

Some whites carried out all those things, but so did many blacks, Arabs, Mongols, Persians, the Khanates, and Turks. Ditto the Japanese against the peoples they conquered in WW2. And, of course there's the Hutus and the Tutsis. And the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs.

Nothing some whites have done hasn't been done by other races throughout history.

You dipshit.

wildswan said...

I noticed is that the view from the pole clearly shows a beating because you see an officer kick the poor guy in the face twice. But the pole picked up no sound. On the officers' body cameras, you can here them shouting: "Gimme your hand", meaning, I take it, that they didn't have Tyre Nichols cuffed and were having trouble doing it. This doesn't explain the kick in the face but it explains why they were on him so long. But then you ask, "why didn't they have a procedure for cuffing other than tasing, whipping, and kicking." But then you think: "That's woman police officer's voice. Maybe she didn't have the strength to force a man's arms back so as to cuff him. So they were trying to cause such pain that he would allow the cuffs. But maybe he was high and resistant to pain."
Are women or short men up to the job of struggling with a tall, well-muscled man or a heavily-muscled criminal just out of the jail exercise yard? Maybe we need a height requirement along with proof before graduation from police academy to the street that the woman candidate can wrestle the cuffs onto a resisting man. If not, she shouldn't be patrolling a bad area. Putting women into the safe areas, leaving men to do the dirty work is a solution. (please, please, just a joke. I'm not talking about Dereck Chauvin.) A height requirement plus making women strengthen themselves might work. Women police might take strength seriously when they see another woman police officer up on charges of murdering a guy because she wasn't up to cuffing a guy (if that's what happened. And it would get us a bit beyond charge and countercharge of racism and reverse racism which is not helping anyone.

Krumhorn said...

Everybody knows that if the police have to run to get you, they're bringing an ass-kicking with them - Chris Rock

- Krumhorn

Steve in Toronto said...

Police are trained using paramilitary methods. The whole point of such "boot camp" style training is to indoctrinate recruits into a new identify. Those men saw them self's as police first not as black men. They had absorbed the values of the institution they had joined

Michael K said...

The former assertion, however (that the American Indians never invented the wheel), is false. Wheeled toys are known from the Classic era of Mexican archaeology, showing that they (some of them) were clearly familiar with the principle — whose most important element, arguably, was not the round wheel (rolling on logs had been known for ages) but the axle.

Your "beasts of burden" argument is weak. Being "familiar with the principle" does not help make something useful. The 10,000 year argument means they never learned anything new. Had someone thought of the use for the wheel besides a toy, it was long enough to get a beast of burden to evolve from a smaller animal. The eohippus was the size of a dog.

Michael K said...

Cook: "We were fighting a (baseless) war in Vietnam, supposedly to help the South fend off the aggression of the North, yet many of our troops came to view all Vietnamese as "gooks," worthy only of suspicion or contempt.

That must be why a half million South Vietnamese who escaped all came to California. They were highly patriotic and a few years later one was the #1 graduate of West Point.

Your infantile leftism, Cook, is tiresome.

Big Mike said...

Too soon!

If not now, then when?

Too easy!

This is how liberals spell “too lacking in opportunities for graft and corruption.”

Let's look straightforwardly at reality and not coddle ourselves.

Nope, let’s not coddle ourselves. Let’s keep on throwing money at the problem like good little liberals, as long as we can keep throwing mud at white people, even when everyone involved is non-white.

Michael K said...


Blogger Robert Cook said...

"Cook writes about 'brother's theory' but that is typical leftist cant."

Ha! Except my brother isn't a leftist. He's a right-winger and a Trump-supporter.


Then the leftist cant is from you. The police=bullies is pure leftist nonsense. Sure, there are cops who are too aggressive but they are not common.

takirks said...

What's the line from "Married With Children"? The one that Al Bundy voices? "Don't try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other."

That speaks a lot to the race situation, as well. Some of the worst "racists" (quotations applied 'cos we all know blacks can't be "racis'"...) against black Americans I've ever encountered were other blacks. Especially actual from-Africa or Caribbean black people, who'd had to live cheek-by-jowl with American blacks at their feral worst. Even "country" blacks from the deepest, darkest most horrid parts of the deep South have issues with "urban youth", and want nothing to do with the inner city dysfunctionals.

It's weird, but when I think back on the various racists I've encountered over the years, the ones who were the most abusively hateful towards the "urban youth" types were... Other blacks. You absolutely do not want to engage with a Nigerian-American who's had to deal with the ghetto to any degree about what they honestly think about American blacks, not unless you want your ears blistered. Same-same with "country" types; the absolutely most disdainful racist-towards-blacks guy I ever encountered in 25 years on active duty was a black senior NCO from backwoods Mississippi. Swear to God, the stuff that came out of his mouth? Your average KKK member would have been telling him he was out of line. I know that, because he even managed to offend another NCO who was a practicing-but-less racist white guy with the things he had to say to some of the blacks in our unit.

Now, that was a bizarre thing to experience as an innocent white kid who'd never actually met or talked to a black person before joining the Army, past saying "Hello" when passing them on the street. I will never forget the speech Sergeant First Class Chalmers gave his platoon after a weekend's misadventures, wherein he basically dismissed the white guys as a bunch of useless no-account crackers who didn't and couldn't know any better, and then spent a solid forty-five minutes going into each and every personal flaw and behavioral issue with the rest of his element that consisted entirely of "urban youth" types. By the time he got done, many of those guys were in actual tears, and some of them were plotting to kill him. Not that any of them ever got their sh*t together enough to pull that off.

Intra-racial prejudice is oftentimes worse than inter-racial prejudice, and it's especially bad with the elements that are put in authority to deal with the miscreant portions of it all.

takirks said...

Steve in Toronto said:

"Police are trained using paramilitary methods. The whole point of such "boot camp" style training is to indoctrinate recruits into a new identify. Those men saw them self's as police first not as black men. They had absorbed the values of the institution they had joined"

This is how you say you don't know what you're talking about without saying you don't know what you're talking about.

The problem with cops isn't their "paramilitary training"; plenty of countries have actual military elements doing a lot of their policing, like France with their Gendarmerie and Italy with their Carabinieri. Radly Balko's theories about the "Militarization of the police..." are so much specious bullshit, as much as I like a lot of his work.

The problem isn't the "militarization", but the entire ethos and culture of the departments these guys go to work in. If militarization were the problem, we'd have had the spectacle of troops going overboard all over the place in Iraq and Afghanistan; instead, the line guys mostly stuck to the ROE and all the rest of the rules. Why are cops displaying rather more feral behavior here at home?

It ain't the "military training", that's for sure. The real problem is the lax supervision by their superiors and the political types that oversee them. Case in point--We had a deputy sheriff in my tiny little mountain hometown empty his magazine, reload, and then fire most of that second one at a guy he found late at night in a parking lot. Guy got out, shot back, there was a pursuit... Some 26 rounds were fired off, in the middle of town. High-speed pursuit followed. Eventual denouement? Gee... Dude he shot at was acquitted of all charges, and that deputy still has a f*cking job with the Sheriff's Department. Cost the county a mint, that stellar display of professionalism did...

If he'd been a soldier and done that under my supervision in Iraq? He'd have had his weapon taken away, he'd have likely been prosecuted under the UCMJ, and we'd have sent his ass home as a civilian.

The police forces in the US do not suffer from "over-militarization". If anything, they suffer from rather too little of it, in that they're laxly supervised, given incredibly lenient Rules of Engagement, and never held accountable.

Narr said...

wildswan, there were no women police involved in the Nichols beating or aftermath, as far as I can tell.

The five fired cops were all well-muscled themselves (as any cop is well-advised to be) and any size and strength advantage lay with them. Nichols looks like a stringbean, strung out or not--and we have no tox report.



Gahrie said...

Some whites carried out all those things, but so did many blacks, Arabs, Mongols, Persians, the Khanates, and Turks. Ditto the Japanese against the peoples they conquered in WW2. And, of course there's the Hutus and the Tutsis. And the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs.

Nothing some whites have done hasn't been done by other races throughout history.


You missed my point, an earlier commentor got it... those were all acts of racism and oppression committed by Democrats.

gilbar said...

but then you ask, "why didn't they have a procedure for cuffing other than tasing, whipping, and kicking."

THIS is the problem, right There. Current Police options for force are:
Polite Words
Taser
SHOOTING

In The Olden Days, Police would have had Billy Clubs; And MOST modren police problems come from them NO Longer having Billy Clubs.
WHY do people resist arrest so much now? Because they Can, and it Often Works (they escape).
A rap from a Billy Club would stop such actions. Much More importantly, the knowledge of the Billy Club would stop such actions.
But, we took Billy Clubs away from police, because we wanted to be "nice"
So, now; we just Tase them, or shoot them, or kick them.

Billy Clubs don't have to be used hard (they Aren't Meant to be used hard), a light rap (which would Hurt!) would usually be More Than Enough. If Fact.. Billy Clubs don't have to be used (they Aren't Meant to be used), the thought of a light rap would usually be More Than Enough.. But: ONLY IF police HAD Billy Clubs

gilbar said...

Serious Question: How do you make an axle, without metal bushings (where the grease goes)?
If you made a wooden wheel, and had it on a wooden axel, and DIDN'T have metal bushings.. You'd have to grease it about every day (hour? minute?) or it'd burn out; and you'd have to start over.

My $0.002 is that the Indians (Aztecs, Incas, Sioux, what ever) didn't have Wheels, because they didn't have Iron (or even Bronze) to make bushings. Without the metal bushings, you go ONLY make toy wheels (or, at best; temporary disposable wheels)

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

leftists love crime and criminals and they hate police. it's that simple really.

say hi to more crime.

Iman said...

“That must be why a half million South Vietnamese who escaped all came to California. They were highly patriotic and a few years later one was the #1 graduate of West Point.”

Cook may be one of those lefties Joan Baez blamed for abandoning the South Vietnamese after the U.S. withdrew. All of them gooks? I don’t think so.

I had a friend - he was a Ranger and served over there. I remember talking with him about a year or so after “The Deerhunter” had been out in the theaters. Back then we’d read news stories about Americans angry about the influx. He lived on a street that had an elementary school about a 1/4 mile down the road from him and some of the kids would pass in front of his house, to and from. More than a few were SE Asian.

I asked him how he felt about this. He said, “I am so happy to see these kids walking to school with their classmates, being noisy and having fun. After all they’ve had to live through…”

His words have stuck with me all through the years.

Iman said...

This was in the city of Orange in Orange County, Ca. (SoCal).

Ironclad said...

To gilbar. The Native Americans didn’t have metal forging so no axles. But more to the point - they didn’t use wheeled vehicles because they had killed off all of the animals that could pull them early in the settlement of North America. No horses, no cows, no donkeys, so who is going to pull the wagons? Buffalo? bears? Not likely. That’s why they had intensive mixed “farms” to grow things - they only had stone or wood implements - no plows.

And don’t get me started about land of lake butter. From what then? Milking Squirrels or beavers?

takirks said...

gilbar said:

"Serious Question: How do you make an axle, without metal bushings (where the grease goes)?
If you made a wooden wheel, and had it on a wooden axel, and DIDN'T have metal bushings.. You'd have to grease it about every day (hour? minute?) or it'd burn out; and you'd have to start over.

My $0.002 is that the Indians (Aztecs, Incas, Sioux, what ever) didn't have Wheels, because they didn't have Iron (or even Bronze) to make bushings. Without the metal bushings, you go ONLY make toy wheels (or, at best; temporary disposable wheels)"


Key difference between the Old World and the New World as far as this stuff goes would be this: Lack of a point to having the wheel. Where the Old World had things like chariots, they also had a lot of flat land and a bunch of easily domesticated animals you could turn into draft animals. What was there in Mexico? Closest thing to a draft animal available was the bison, and you ain't domesticating one of those or breaking it to the yoke without a whole hell of a lot of hard work that would have very few rewards for generations. In the Andes, the mountainous terrain meant that the wheel was effectively inferior as a transportation solution, so pack-trains of llamas and alpacas made a lot more sense. And, humans on foot...

Before the Spaniards reintroduced the horse, mule, and burro to North America, the best pack animal anyone had was the dog or another human. Which, again, is why the wheel wasn't ever a major thing.

The lack of metal for bushings wouldn't be a reason at all; the Egyptians and others relied solely on wood and leather for their axle/wheel interface construction.

Gospace said...

Dave Begley said...
...
One of my fraternity brothers was a native of Guam. He hated Filipinos.


No surprise there.

In the good ol' USA, all of us Caucasians live next to each other, intermarry, and get along.

In Great Britain, English don't get along with Irish, and Scots don't get along with anyone, and does anyone ever hear anything about the Welsh?

In Belgium, the Walloons and Flemish don't get along.

Czechoslovakia is now the Czech Republic and Slovokia.

And let's not talk about the entire area aroung Serbia.

By ancestry, I'm English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and some Danish- by way of Vikings, I'm certain. And my children are all that and Bohemian, Bavarian, other forms of German, Greece, ... and some DNA comes from further East.

So none of them get along over there, but here they're all mixed together in us in the USA. E Pluribus Unum as a concept when embraced by all works. DemoncRATs want us all to belong to group other than Americans. And with the groups that have embraced their group identity- we can clearly see they don't get along with anyone else.

As far as groups go, up above the Hutsis and Tutsis have already been mentioned among the non-Caucasians. Quick- can any of you tell the difference between Hutsis and Tutsis? I can't. In Great Britain the people who live there can easily tell the difference between the 4 major population groups, English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish. None of here in the USA can. And from what I've read- and what I've seen in my travels- anywhere in the world just by watching us stroll along the other people of the world can tell if we're Americans. The way we look around, the way we smile at everyone, the way we make eye contact easily, all these and the confidence Americans have enables them to tell us at a glance. DUmp any individual from Great Britain, Ireland, France, any of the Scandinavian countries, well, just about anywhere in Europe into any town in teh USA, and until they startto speak, no one will know at a glance that they're not American. We may notice they behave a little differently, but that isn't an automatic marker of foreignness.

I think Teddy Roosevelt was one of the first to refer to hypenated Americans. And, he made a good point. Either you think of yourself as an American, or you think of yourself as something else with a hyphen.

wildswan said...

Narr said...
wildswan, there were no women police involved in the Nichols beating or aftermath, as far as I can tell.
7:51

Perhaps I'm wrong. I read up on the officers arrested and some had been football players. So they should have been strong enough. Still maybe they didn't keep up with the weights because I still think they had too much trouble cuffing him. It just looks like a failure in technique which is being overcome by beating and kicking. And it looks like retaliation for the trouble he was giving them. Apparently the pepper spray hit some of the officers. As for women being present, none were charged but I thought I heard one on Video 4 City of Memphis linked from the NY Post story

https://nypost.com/2023/01/27/video-shows-tyre-nichols-being-beaten-by-memphis-police/
1:32
4:53-57-5:38
9:25
10:11-11:06

MikeR said...

David Simon, author of "The Wire" https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish:
"When Ed and I reported “The Corner,” it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers... You take out your nightstick and you’re white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn't know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers — however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required — it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause."

Michael McNeil said...

My $0.002 is that the Indians (Aztecs, Incas, Sioux, what ever) didn't have Wheels, because they didn't have Iron (or even Bronze) to make bushings.

Incorrect assumptions lead to garbage conclusions. The (Mexican and Peruvian and points in between) Indians knew and were expert craftsmen in a number of metals — gold, silver, and copper, together alloys of same. By the time the Europeans arrived on the scene bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) was also known. It's true that they didn't use these metals much for weapons — basically because military technology among the American natives hadn't yet evolved in that direction.

Michael McNeil said...

Your "beasts of burden" argument is weak. Being "familiar with the principle" does not help make something useful. The 10,000 year argument means they never learned anything new. Had someone thought of the use for the wheel besides a toy, it was long enough to get a beast of burden to evolve from a smaller animal. The eohippus was the size of a dog.

Speaking of weak arguments! Horse-ancestor Eohippus lived 50 million years ago — that's the amount of forced evolution you're advocating! (from a time long before humans existed) — meanwhile, (modern) horses in America had and have been extinct for 10 millennia. And why should the American peoples be (stupidly) criticized for taking (only!) some 6,000 years to invent civilization (while doing imperfectly, according to Michael), when humans in the Old World took approximately 300,000 years (!) — the whole age of our species less about 8,000 years — to come up with the same?

Indeed, what causes cultures after untold millennia of hunting-and-gathering wandering, to eventually settle down, invent agriculture, literacy, and cities (not necessarily in that order) — meanwhile multitudes of other cultures don't (at least until they see the example of others laid before them)? It's really quite mysterious.

Sophisticated animal breeding (not to speak of the concept of evolution!) is a relatively recent, advanced technology. If the (Mexican, say) Indians had appreciated the kind of animal breeding (forced evolution really) that Michael Kennedy is critiquing them for not knowing about, they could have bred their dogs (not to speak of eons-a-gone horse-ancestors) to haul their carts, wagons, and chariots. That kind of insight, though, concerning and requiring the connecting of two radically different technologies (wheels, with breeding beasts of burden), would be difficult in the extreme for any civilization at any stage in history to hit on — particularly when they hadn't even gotten started yet going down that road.

Remember that civilization in America began 4,000 years after the Old World. No real wonder that the American natives ended up behind in some (actually quite a few) areas. But their accomplishments were also pretty amazing, considering.

One might look at Australia for comparison. Humans have lived in Australia for perhaps 60,000 years (at least 4 times longer than the Americas' maybe 15,000), but the Australian natives never invented either agriculture or civilization.

~ Gordon Pasha said...

My initial hypothesis appears to be correct.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/memphis-cops-in-tyre-nichols-murder-hired-after-pd-relaxed-job-standards/

takirks said...

The proposition that the Americas had "less advanced" civilizations has to be questioned.

At the time of Cortez, Tenochtitlan was a bigger city than many in Europe, and had far superior public sanitation. Granted, the agriculture wasn't really capable of supporting the population, which is one reason it is supposed that the Aztec may have been so enthusiastic about levying their neighbors for human sacrifice--All that lovely protein as a side-benefit to the whole thing.

The Amazon apparently hosted a massively sophisticated agricultural system that supported millions, producing the so-called loma prieta soils that even today represent the best agricultural sites in the region. We still don't know the full extent of what existed there, due to it all being overgrown with jungle and the fact that we never considered the region as an artifact of human effort, which it apparently is.

North America itself is another argument for us simply not recognizing what we were looking at. The Mound Builders did things across the Midwest that are far beyond what are traditionally thought to be just a bunch of hunter-gatherers. The Old Copper culture sites in Wisconsin are another sign that we don't know as much as we like to think we do about the sophistication of the cultures that were here. Some of the mining sites up there are massive endeavors, with really mind-boggling implications insofar as the sheer volume of the copper that must have been removed.

If it weren't for the diseases brought from Europe, it's questionable just how far the Europeans would have gotten. North America was virtually depopulated, with the sophisticated agricultural systems used collapsing under the absence of management. Even so, the signs are there--Pre-Columbus, there weren't too many passenger pigeons found in the trash middens of the various tribes in their population zone. It was only after the pressure on the food sources they used that the passenger pigeon populations took off, becoming the vast flocks our ancestors knew and wiped out. The inference from these facts are that the reason that there was a huge population explosion of those birds stemmed from the sudden availability of food that the locals were no longer eating due to "dead from epidemic".

Eastern US had a bunch of tribes that practiced very efficient agriculture in patterns we didn't recognize because it didn't include plows, fences, and domesticated animals. They fed a huge population via what might best be described as "enhanced hunter-gatherer" techniques, ones that left obvious signs if you know what to look for. Like the Amazon, the region wasn't under the plow, but it was massively productive when it came to foodstuffs.

And, for a lot less work.

Big Mike said...

Humans have lived in Australia for perhaps 60,000 years (at least 4 times longer than the Americas' maybe 15,000), but the Australian natives never invented either agriculture or civilization.

Tough to invent anything when every damned creature is trying to kill you. Now go pet your Sydney funnel web spider. Or your blue ring octopus. Or your red-belly black snake.

Gahrie said...

Tough to invent anything when every damned creature is trying to kill you. Now go pet your Sydney funnel web spider. Or your blue ring octopus. Or your red-belly black snake.

Too busy fighting off lions, bears and wolves.

takirks said...

@~Gordon Pasha,

"My initial hypothesis appears to be correct.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/memphis-cops-in-tyre-nichols-murder-hired-after-pd-relaxed-job-standards/ "


I'd wondered if that had something to do with it, just as with the whole Justine Diamond thing.

It's all of a piece, a self-referential self-reinforcing vicious circle; the cops get vilified, it gets harder to recruit them, standards get lowered, the lower-standard cops cause more problems, they get vilified more, the harder it gets to find anyone to do the job, the lower the standards and training go, and on and on and on...

Here's an unpleasant truth, however: The kind of policing you get is the kind you deserve, as a population. If the "policed" are polite and non-violent, then the cops can afford to be polite and non-violent; if you're not? Well, guess what? The sort of policing you get when you keep shooting at the cops is going to be a rather different affair than what you get in the British Isles of cherished memories, when the bobbies all wore tall helmets, carried nothing but whistles, and firearms weren't a thing for criminals or cops.

The people on the front lines of the protests have rather more to do with the kind of policing they get than they want to admit. It's not all a one-way street of authoritarians abusing the public; after all, just who voted for those politicians in the first damn place? Is Memphis some sort of bastion of the white supremacist KKK, or is the population actually 65% black and the politicians running the city having been reflective of that for a long damn time? Look into it; tell me what you find.

The reality here is that it's not just policing that's a shiite-show; it's all of the things that go into the "public order" equation that produce this result. The public is just as much at fault as the cops; if this Tyre Nichols character had sat in his car, hands on his steering wheel and been polite and non-confrontational with the cops? What then? Would this have happened?

Black America has rather more to do with the sort of policing they get in their communities than they like to acknowledge. Do remember what got Nixon going on his "War on (some) Drugs"; it was a deputation of black community leaders going to the White House and "demanding action" on the drug issue they saw destroying their communities. They got precisely what they asked for, and then a generation later were blaming everyone but themselves for the high incarceration rate among young black males...

Michael K said...

Like the Amazon, the region wasn't under the plow, but it was massively productive when it came to foodstuffs.

The Iroquois had advanced agriculture and a quite sophisticates culture. Unfortunately, they allied themselves with the French in hops that the French, who were not colonists, would prevail in the war with the English. It didn't happen and resulted in war between the colonists and the Indians. The "massively productive" Indian agriculture was similar to that of the Medieval period in Europe. It did not support the population necessary to win that battle.

Tina Trent said...

Actually, the most prominent policewoman involved, the Memphis Chief of Police, was fired from the top position in internal affairs in Atlanta for blocking the investigation of her friend's husband's involvement in child pornography. The friend quit the department and avoided prosecution: the feds had to step in and convict the child pornographer.

That makes three minority, high-ranking female officers in Atlanta complicit in covering up sex crimes against mostly minority children: these two police officials and former Chief of Police Beverly Harvard. CJ Davis even got her job back with the Atlanta police before she moved on to Chief in another city, then Chief in Memphis.

Incidentally, the white officer who exposed the Harvard scandal was himself demoted and driven out of the department. For protecting minority children who were being exploited sexually. He previously helped end the nightmare of the M&M murders of young black boys, playing a leading role in capturing Wayne Williams. He and the other white police who worked the hell out of that case were as traumatized by it as their black fellow officers, as the Mayor raked in donations and the Chief was befuddled and the FBI took credit for what the mostly-white Atlanta police actually did. Perhaps Van Jones can mull all this over.

Narr said...

When it come to material culture. I recommend everyone rush to Amazon over there and order Postrel's "Fabric of Civilization" and Ennos's "Age of Wood." We take so much for granted, that took our ancestors tens of thousands of years to figure out, and we have forgotten.

Charles Mann's "1491" is a good overview of just how advanced and sophisticated some of the peoples (can I say that?) of the Americas were Before Contact, to include much earlier cultures that nobody knew about until modern times.

Maybe it's time to trot the Jared Diamond horse out for a beating . . .

n.n said...

A slave class. Women as beasts of burden... not that "burden". Immigration reform to sustain a privileged minority in the fashion they are accustomed. That said, necessity is the mother of invention.

takirks said...

There's an ugly truth that I first verbalized looking up at the mountains drinking my coffee this morning: You begin by demonizing your police, and you end by having your policing performed by demons.

It's really that simple. You want Officer Friendly? Well, you'd better be careful about who you hire for that job... And, more importantly, how you treat them after you hire them.

Black America is about to learn that lesson the hard way, I suspect. Much of this problem is down to the choices they've made, are making, and who will wind up exerting social control. Gang enforcers won't be any more kind or considerate; they just won't be in uniform.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

When white people do something wrong it's ultimately the fault of white supremacy.
When non-white people do something wrong it's ultimately also the fault of white supremacy.
You can tell it's a well-reasoned, scientific system of belief since it's entirely immune from any requirement of falsifiability--it simply *must* be true and anyone questioning that must therefore be a vicious racist.

Richard Aubrey said...

Random points. Tutsi--see Watusi--are Nilotics. See Manute Bol. Hutu are closer to Bantu, see, say, Charles Barkley. Can easily be told apart.

Cops have lost their intermediate techniques due to "bad optics". See Rodney King who was not injured by lateral strikes across the large muscles of the back.

Interesting thing about the Mound Builders is that they have a lot of copper items of metal from Michigan's upper peninsula. But no trade goods from Ohio up to the Keweenaw Peninsula. How'd that happen?

You don't need metal bushings to make small carts or wheelbarrows to be hauled around urban settings, or farms.

BUMBLE BEE said...

Have had some friends back in college who worked as orderlies in some of the major metro hospitals. This was the era of PCP users who were transported to hospitals by police rather than jails. Medical/legal treatment of drug issues some of you might recall.
The stories they told of trying to strap these dudes onto gurneys were of heroic struggle.
The toxicology report reveals all.