Tag Archives: #Race

Posted on by

A stunning lack of perspective

For the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading it’s all about racism. From Sunday’s Washington Post:

    ‘Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped’

    By DeNeen L. Brown | August 8, 2021

    JACKSON, Miss. — Since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports.

    “The last recorded lynching in the United States was in 1981,” said Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond. “But the thing is, lynchings never stopped in the United States. Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped. The evil bastards just stopped taking photographs and passing them around like baseball cards.”

    Jefferson was born in Jones County, Miss., which was an epicenter of the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during the civil rights movement. “Coming from Mississippi and seeing stuff intersect, talking about this stuff is like talking about what happened down the road,” said Jefferson, a Harvard Law School graduate who trained as a civil justice investigator with Bond.

    In 2017, Jefferson began compiling records of Black people found hanging or mutilated across the country. In 2019, Jefferson began focusing her investigation on Mississippi. In each case she investigated, law enforcement officials ruled the deaths suicides, but the families said the victims had been lynched.

    Historically, lynchings were often defined as fatal hangings by mobs, often acting with impunity and in an extrajudicial capacity to create racial terror. Crowds of White people often gathered in town squares or on courthouse lawns to watch Black people be lynched.

There’s much more at the original.

DeNeen L Brown is an award-winning reporter, but she is also someone who very much has an agenda:

    Brown has written extensively about the country’s history of racial terror lynchings and massacres. After Brown’s 2018 story on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was published on the front page of The Washington Post, the mayor of Tulsa announced he would reopen the city’s search for mass graves of Black victims of the massacre. In October 2020, the city discovered a mass grave that may be connected to the massacre. Scientists will begin examining the remains this summer.

    Over more than three decades, Brown has been a ground-breaking reporter, with a strong writing voice uncovering stories about the Black community. At The Post, Brown covered night police, education, courts, politics, arts, theater and culture. She has been a staff writer in the famed Style section of The Washington Post and a staff writer for The Washington Post magazine, where she wrote award-winning narratives.

The problem is that, for an award-winning reporter, this article was not exactly the epitome of good journalism. Miss Brown extensively covers the mission of Jill Collen Jefferson, but provides virtually nothing in corroboration, and nothing that might call into question Miss Jefferson’s statements or conclusions.

    “There is a pattern to how these cases are investigated,” Jefferson said. “When authorities arrive on the scene of a hanging, it’s treated as a suicide almost immediately. The crime scene is not preserved. The investigation is shoddy. And then there is a formal ruling of suicide, despite evidence to the contrary. And the case is never heard from again unless someone brings it up.”

Is Miss Jefferson’s statement true? Miss Brown never investigates or questions it. She then proceeds to list the eight victims that Miss Jefferson alleges to have been lynched:

  • Raynard Johnson, 17: June 16, 2000: “There’s enough circumstantial stuff here that warrants a serious investigation. We will not rest until those who committed this murder are brought to justice,” Jackson told demonstrators before leading a march to the pecan tree where Raynard was found. “We reject the suicide theory.” In February 2001, the Justice Department announced it ended its investigation into Johnson’s death: “The evidence does not support a federal criminal civil rights prosecution.”

In other words, the federal Department of Justice, during the Administration of President Bill Clinton, investigated the evidence, and couldn’t find sufficient evidence to conclude that there was a lynching. Though the younger George Bush was President by the time this was announced, it was the first month of his term.

  • Nick Naylor, 23: January 9, 2003

Mr Taylor’s family claims that this was a murder, but no evidence other than that claim is provided.

  • Roy Veal, 55: April 22, 2004

A state police spokesman said that Mr Veal’s death was consistent with suicide, but that the case is with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. No other information is given.

  • Frederick Jermaine Carter, 26: December 3, 2010: Frederick Jermaine Carter was found hanging from a tree limb in a White neighborhood in Greenwood, Miss. The state medical examiner ruled Carter’s death a suicide. Relatives called it a lynching and demanded for a federal investigation. Derrick Johnson, then-state president of the Mississippi NAACP, told reporters that the community had “lost all confidence in the ability of local law enforcement to investigate” the case of Carter’s hanging. He called on the Justice Department to investigate. A spokesperson for the department declined to comment on the case.

Note that Mr Carter’s death occurred in December of 2010, and the federal Department of Justice was under the control of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, men not at all inclined to cover up a lynching and, especially in the case of Mr Holder, men not at all afraid to stir up divisions if they believed there was an incident of racial injustice or civil rights violations.

  • Craig Anderson, 49: June 26, 2011

This case actually was proven to be a hate crime, and three teenagers were convicted in federal court.

  • Otis Byrd, 54: March 19, 2015

Mr Byrd was paroled in 2006 following a 1980 conviction for murder. Miss Brown’s article noted that the FBI and Justice Department launched an investigation, but stated that there was no evidence to prove Mr Byrd’s death was a homicide. This was under the Obama Administration.

  • Phillip Carroll, 22: May 28, 2017: Phillip Carroll was found hanging from a tree in Jackson, Miss. Police called the death a suicide. Early reports said Carroll had been found with his hands tied behind his back. Police denied that account. “If there’s any other information or evidence that anyone may have to make us believe that it may not be a suicide, again, we’re open to any information and any evidence to aid us in the investigation,” Jackson Police Commander Tyree Jones told reporters. “But as of right now, we don’t have anything other than the fact that his death has been ruled a suicide.”

Jackson Police Commander Tyree Jones is black, so he’s not the type to cover up a racially motivated lynching.

  • Deondrey Montreal Hopkins, 35: May 5, 2019: Deondrey Montreal Hopkins, who lived in Columbus, Miss., was found hanging from a tree on a bank of the Luxapallila Creek. Columbus Police Chief Fred Shelton said Hopkins’s death was not a homicide. The Justice Department declined to comment on the case.

That’s it, that’s the end of Miss Brown’s article. And other than one, which was a matter of public record, there is no evidence of anything other than speculation by concerned parties and family members that these deaths were lynchings.

That does not mean that some of these cases weren’t actually murders, murders by people clever enough to have left no incriminating evidence. It also does not mean that some of these cases, if homicides, couldn’t have been carried out by black men rather than white. This is the problem with the award-winning reporter’s reporting: it’s nothing other than the speculation of Miss Jefferson. Were I the editor of The Washington Post, I would have read this story, and rather than give it the huge title seen on the newspaper’s website, I would have returned it to her with the instructions to get more, because this is agenda-driven journolism,[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term … Continue reading not journalism.

I entitled this article “A stunning lack of perspective,” for a very good reason. DeNeen Brown was very, very concerned with eight possible lynchings, over the past 21 years, yet in St Louis, Missouri, as of August 7th of this year, there have been 109 homicides, and of those 109 murders, 100 have been of black victims, 81 males and 19 females. St Louis, with a population of 294,890 is almost evenly divided between black and white residents, yet 91.74% of the murder victims there are black. Miss Brown is very concerned with eight homicides of black men over 21 years, while more than eight black men have been murdered in the Gateway to the West every single month!

And of the 49 known suspects in those killings, 48 are also black, while one is listed as race unknown.

Why doesn’t that concern Miss Brown? While I cannot read her mind, one suspicion immediately comes to mind: there is no political advantage for the left to note the tremendous black-on-black homicide rate in America.

I use St Louis statistics because St Louis is not only a very high murder rate city, but one of the few to publish the racial statistics along with the other numbers. Other murder centers like Chicago and Philadelphia publish the numbers, but we generally don’t find out the racial breakdowns until the end of the year. P F Whalen noted, near the end of July, that Philadelphia has the Highest Murder Rate Of The Largest U.S. Cities,[3]In something of a stunning development, in the two weeks between the end of Thursday, July 22nd and Thursday, August 5th, Philly has only eight reported homicides! As often as I have reported on the … Continue reading but as far as the racial numbers are concerned, we don’t have the breakdown. We only know that last year, 86% of homicide victims were black, in a city that is only about 44% black. Of course, I have noted, uncounted times, that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t care about homicides in the city unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like Rian Thal.

At least the Inquirer’s motives are clear: publisher Elizabeth Hughes has stated that she wants to make the Inquirer an “anti racist news organization,” and paying attention to the appalling black-on-black homicide rate in the city runs quite contrary to her goals.

Whether that is how the editors of The Washington Post think, I do not know.

Perspective is important. Yes, those eight men who died, over 21 years, in Mississippi, are important, but are they really more important that the 322 people who have poured out their life’s blood in Philadelphia’s mean streets? The only difference that I can see is DeNeen Brown’s apparent assumption that some or all of them were killed in lynchings by Evil White Men.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 In something of a stunning development, in the two weeks between the end of Thursday, July 22nd and Thursday, August 5th, Philly has only eight reported homicides! As often as I have reported on the carnage in the City of Brotherly Love, I am shocked.
Posted on by

Political correctness obscures the history of a brave black frontiersman

As we were moving from Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania to our small farm in the Bluegrass State, our 624 mile trip took us down Interstate 68 in Maryland. Along that most scenic of Interstate highways, the Old Line State maintains a few elevation signs near the tops of mountains, like Keyser’s Ridge at 2,880 feet, and Meadow Mountain, the elevation of which I do not remember. They were interesting, in passing, but not so interesting that I felt the need to research them.

Negro Mountain sign on I-68 in Maryland; the sign has been removed,

But there was one I did research, because of its seemingly unusual name: Negro Mountain. From The Baltimore Sun:

    The great divide: Negro Mountain in Maryland and Pennsylvania retains its name despite controversy

    October 3, 2020 | 3:01 AM EDT

    PITTSBURGH — An Allegheny Mountain ridge stretching some 30 miles from the Casselman River in southern Somerset County to Deep Creek Lake in Western Maryland has been the focus of controversy as attempts continue to change a name dating to the French and Indian War.

    The name in question: Negro Mountain.

    The name has been used consistently at least since 1841, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Negro Ridge was cited in the Pennsylvania Senate Journal in 1842.

    “If a name is offensive to people — remove it,” said James Saku, a geography professor and coordinator of African American Studies at Frostburg State University in Maryland, located about 20 miles east of the site.

There’s more at the original, but I have to ask: why is the word that the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, used to refer to his race, offensive?

Why was the mountain so named? The most widely accepted, but still not proven, story is that a free black man believed to have been named Nemesis, or possibly Goliath, the “body servant” of Col. Thomas Cresap, was killed in 1756 in a fierce battle with Indians during the French and Indian War.

    Cresap, an English-born frontiersman and land speculator in Maryland and Pennsylvania, named the mountain in honor of Nemesis’ race, according to an account from the Western Maryland Historic Library, part of the Western Maryland Regional Library in Hagerstown.

    That account also was published in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette on June 17, 1756. Another account offers a different version, saying the man died while fighting with a Capt. Friend.

Lynn Bowman, an adjunct associate professor of English and speech at Allegany College of Maryland, has a darker version. She claimed that the west side of the mountain there was an area called [culturally inappropriate slang term derived from Negro] Hollow where black people were lynched, though that would seem to post-date the name of the mountain.

Well, who can know, but it wouldn’t have made much sense to name the mountain for Nemesis’ race if the second account is the true one.

But one thing is certain: I would never have heard of Nemesis, or Goliath if that was what he was called, had the mountain been named Nemesis Mountain; it would have held no interest to me. I also did not know that there were free black men on the frontier at the time; now, I do.

Alas Political correctness has struck!

    Negro Mountain signs ‘part of history’

    By Teresa McMinn | November 3, 2019

    CUMBERLAND — Kenneth Lloyd wants to buy the Negro Mountain signs, which disappeared from Garrett County roads earlier this year, and install them in his front yard.

    Negro Mountain occupies a 30-mile stretch of the Alleghenies from Deep Creek Lake north to the Casselman River in Pennsylvania.

    The ridge in Garrett County reaches 3,075 feet at its peak, and in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, marks the highest point in the state.

    The Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration earlier this year removed four Negro Mountain signs — two from Interstate 68 and two from U.S. Alternate Route 40.

    “I’m highly upset,” Lloyd, a Philadelphia native who now lives in Grantsville, said of the missing signs.

    “That’s a part of the history of this country,” said Lloyd, who served in the U.S. Marines from 1979 to 1986 and now works as a truck driver. “Learn from it.”

    According to Lora Rakowski, acting director of the state highway agency’s office of communications, the removal of the signs cost $212 in staff time.

    “We know this issue involves an important piece of local history,” she said via email. “We also know that some people feel the signage was inappropriate.”

There is some dispute about the man’s name; it was not given in the contemporaneous stories. What is given is that he was a free black man, a frontiersman, who fought and died on that mountain. But his deeds, even if perhaps somewhat legendary, honor him, but, due to the political correctness of the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading, fewer people will know of it.

And so the signs are gone. There will be no future travelers on I-68 in Garrett County, Maryland, who will see the odd sign, and decide to Google search for it, and what little remains of Nemesis’ memory will fade away.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

    Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
    By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
Posted on by

More discrimination against Asians by the left

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1

We have previously noted the apparently acceptable racial discrimination against Asians in the United States, and how white liberals not think that black and Hispanic students “have what it takes to compete on merit,” but they dismiss the achievements of students of Asian ethnicity as “white adjacent.”

From The Wall Street Journal:

    The Revolt of the Unwoke

    Three progressive San Francisco school board members are targeted for a recall.

    By William McGurn | July 26, 2021 | 6:26 PM EDT

    If the land of woke has a capital, it’s San Francisco. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that the City by the Bay has now become ground zero for a revolt by unwoke moms and dads.

Continue reading →

Posted on by

The racism of white liberals has made itself clear

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1

We have previously noted the apparently acceptable racial discrimination against Asians in the United States. From The Wall Street Journal:

    A PTA Purge of Asians

    America’s top public high school shows us what discrimination looks like today.

    By William McGurn | July 12, 2021 6:14 pm ET

    When Jeannie C. Riley released “Harper Valley P.T.A.” in 1968, her hit single mocked a parent-teacher association for telling a school mom she was wearing her dresses way too high. Today the real-life sequel is playing out at the Virginia Parent Teacher Association and its chapter at a high-performing public school in Fairfax County. This time, however, parents are complaining about the PTA—that it’s in cahoots with those watering down entrance standards with the aim of reducing the school’s Asian-American population.

    Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a school for gifted students ranked No. 1 among all public high schools nationwide by U.S. News & World Report. In December the county school board changed its admissions process, replacing a rigorous, race-blind entrance exam with a “holistic” (read: subjective) formula that includes grades but also puts caps on the number of students each middle school could send to TJ—a de facto limit on middle schools with high numbers of Asian-American students.

    The desired result has been achieved. The percentage of Asian-Americans admitted to TJ dropped to 54% this year from 73% last year. Whites, blacks and Latinos all saw their numbers go up. No doubt this is only the beginning.

Were such a program installed to lower the percentage of blacks or Hispanics at a selective high school, the left would be screaming bloody murder. But when it punishes a high-achieving group, even a minority one, you can see what has happened: equality of opportunity has been replaced with “equity,” a ‘progressive’ shorthand for equality of results. I’d really like to just quote the entire OpEd piece, but that’s plagiarism, and a violation of Fair Use standards. Read the entire thing, if you can. Sadly, about half of the article is behind the subscriber paywall.

    One of these coalition candidates is Harry Jackson, a retired Navy officer. In a March 10 piece for The Washington Post, he explained his position this way: “When I see the effort to water down the admissions standards to TJ — and let’s be clear, that effort is led by paternalistic White liberals who are determined to ‘help’ minority students at any cost — I see it for what it is: a tacit admission that they don’t think Black and Hispanic students have what it takes to compete on merit.”

It’s more than just that. Not only do the white liberals not think that black and Hispanic students “have what it takes to compete on merit,” but they dismiss the achievements of students of Asian ethnicity as “white adjacent.”

    Asra Nomani is a Bombay-born newswoman who previously worked as a reporter for this newspaper. She is also the mother of a recent TJ grad, a member of the local PTA and a co-founder of the Coalition for TJ. She describes what’s happening this way:

    “The mostly white Virginia PTA is trying to hijack our all-minority TJ victory because we are an inconvenient minority for them. The woke warriors are so afraid of our mostly immigrant, mostly Asian parents because we defy their narrative of oppressed minorities in a racist America. We’re unapologetic, and that scares them so much that they don’t even realize how they are now perpetrators of a systemic racism and tyranny they claim to oppose.”

It’s more than that. For the #woke to accept the notion that Americans of Asian descent might have achieved the success that they have due to their hard work — this Washington Post article tries to debunk that idea — then the left would have to accept the idea that behavior does influence success, and the lack of it, and that would open the door to the horrible, horrible notion that less successful groups are less successful due to their own behavior.

    It’s certainly not bringing out the best in people who pride themselves on racial sensitivity, Virginia’s education secretary, Atif Qarni, likened Asian-American kids taking test preparation to athletes taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

Really? So parents trying to do the best thing for their children, such as giving them the opportunity to practice for admissions tests, is a terrible, terrible thing, but parents who might send their kids to, say, a basketball camp, to try to improve skills to make their high school teams, that’s OK?

You know, that’s what parents do: they try to make life easier for their children, they try to give their kids the best start on life that they can. Isn’t that what sending their children to school is all about in the first place?

William McGurn’s closing paragraph, however, pretty much misses the boat:

    Today’s targeting of successful Asian-American kids lacks the crudity of a Jim Crow lunch counter or a whites-only drinking fountain. But it is no less ugly — and no less racially discriminatory — for being more genteel.

That’s just it: what the ‘progressives’ are doing today does not lack crudity, and is not more genteel. It’s obvious, it’s blatant, it’s visible to anyone with the eyes to see . . . and the willingness to look.

Posted on by

They can’t handle the truth!

The Friday morning report from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows the city on the edge of another milestone: with 299 souls sent early to their eternal rewards, the 300th murder will almost certainly happen sometime today, but the PPD only updates the site on weekdays; we will (probably) not get the totals until Monday morning. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, the city was seeing 1.5255 homicides per day, on pace for 557 for 2021, a number which is actually down slightly.

We have previously noted how some residents in Philadelphia have, in effect, put themselves in jail, by barring up their row homes to protect themselves from the bad guys who roam their streets. The image to the right, which the reader can enlarge by clicking on it, shows four row homes, out of six, in which the residents have caged themselves in at night.

Now comes Jabari K. Jones, the President of the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative, telling us of the effect that “gun violence” is having upon black business owners in the City of Brotherly Love:

    West Philly business owners have lost faith in the City to keep them safe

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence they will be safe.

    by Jabari Jones | July 14, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

    Visit one of our historic commercial corridors in West Philadelphia or any predominantly diverse community after sundown, and the sight is the same: silver shutter gates, dark storefronts, and empty businesses that have closed for the day.

    Now, on that same day, visit Center City after dark. Bars and restaurants are thriving, people of all ages stroll by storefronts, and everyone is open for business.

    The reason for the difference? Public safety.

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence in the City of Philadelphia to keep them or their patrons safe from the rising tide of gun violence.

    In the last two months, a Dunkin’ Donuts manager in North Philly was murdered as she was opening the store at dawn, and West Philadelphia fashion designer Sircarr Johnson, Jr. was shot and killed when his cookout was sprayed with over 100 rounds.

    According to the Pew Charitable Trust, only 2.5% of Philly businesses have Black owners, even though Black people represent nearly 44% of city residents. But data from the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative show that, on certain corridors in West Philly, Black people own a majority of businesses. A stroll through Center City, however, shows mostly larger corporate stores and white-owned businesses. For years, business and city officials have studied why the city’s racial demographics aren’t reflected in business ownership, and why BIPOC-owned businesses fail at higher rates.

There’s more at the original, and I’d really like to republish it all, but that would be plagiarism, and exceed Title 17 U.S.C., §107 “Fair use” standards. Briefly, Mr Jones tells the reader that “white-owned businesses” in Center City have several more hours per day in which they can be open, meaning several more hours per day in which they can sell their goods and services, and make money. I’d encourage people to follow the link and read the whole thing.

Nevertheless, Mr Jones still danced around the real issue. While pointing out that the economic damage was heavily skewed to black-owned businesses, in heavily black neighborhoods, he could not bring himself to point out that the city’s “gun violence” problem is a black “gun violence” problem. The black shooters aren’t just wounding and killing people, but black-owned businesses as well.

The next day came Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, with a similar sense of denial of reality:

    There’s nothing more progressive than stopping city kids from getting shot

    Progressives need to understand what’s behind rising city homicides and develop plans to reduce shootings — without yesterday’s police abuses.

    by Will Bunch | July 15, 2021

    The easiest part of writing this column was the beginning — finding the most up-to-date examples of the gun violence in Philadelphia that has steadily risen since the start of the pandemic and has lately spiked again, in the long hot summer of 2021.

    Just hours earlier — at 1 a.m. on an unseasonably muggy Thursday morning — a man bounded onto SEPTA’s Nite Owl bus on Broad Street near Chestnut, in the beating heart of Center City, and started shooting, critically wounding a 29-year-old man and utterly terrifying the 15 other passengers onboard. Just a few hours earlier, a car chase in the city’s Logan section had ended with a gunman from one car shooting and wounding two teenagers, aged 19 and just 14, from the other car after it had crashed into an SUV with four occupants. At roughly the same time in West Philadelphia, an unrelated shooting wounded a 15-year-old and 13-year-old.

    Go back to the night before, or the night before that, and you’ll find similarly grim stories: Philadelphia teenagers — their names, along with their stories and their humanity, rarely identified — wounded or even killed by the latest burst of gunfire. Of the more than 1,200 people shot so far in Philadelphia in a year that’s barely half over, more than 100 have been children. With 297 people murdered so far, there’s a more than decent chance that the so-called City of Brotherly Love will pass its all-time homicide record of 500 back in 1990. This is a human-rights crisis in America’s sixth-largest — and founding — city.

    And yet, as many conservatives and mainstream-media contrarian types have been so quick to point out, rising murder rates — occurring right now in most American big cities — haven’t been a front-burner for the political left in 2021. Indeed, there’s been a habit, at least on social media, of tsk-tsking the problem by pointing to “if it bleeds, it leads” media sensationalism (a real thing) or noting that overall crime rates, including the violent crime category, haven’t really spiked and remain near historical lows. This seems prompted by fears that making urban gun violence a top-tier issue will both hurt the movement against social injustices like police brutality and mass incarceration, and also distract from other issues on the progressive to-do list.

I have to give Mr Bunch credit here: whether he realized it or not, he told the truth: many credentialed media sources fear telling the truth, because the truth goes against the liberal narrative. We have previously noted, many times, that the Inquirer doesn’t bother to report on murders in Philadelphia unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal. For the Inquirer to actually tell the truth would be for that publisher-directed “anti-racist news organization” to undermine its political direction.

Mr Bunch called “mass incarceration” a “social injustice,” yet had Delaware Superior Court Judge Vivian L. Medinilla been perhaps a little less concerned with “mass incarceration,” Christine Lugo and several other people in Philly and New Castle County, Delaware would almost certainly still be alive today. Mr Jones, in his column, had noted Jovaun Patterson was given a sweetheart plea deal, dropping an attempted murder charge, for shooting and permanently crippling a West Philly shop owner, 3½ to 10 years,[1]Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%. by District Attorney Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer incredibly endorsed for re-election. Mr Bunch, and in part Mr Jones, didn’t want to see the one program which actually does reduce shootings and killings: keeping the bad guys locked up, for as long as the law allows.

Let’s tell the truth here: in a city that is only 42.13% black, according to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, 75.53% of all shooting victims are black males, and another 6.72% are black females; 82.25% of all victims are black. Just 4.06% are white males, with 0.86% being white women.

If the problem is the availability of firearms, as the Inquirer so often tells us, why aren’t white people, 40.66% of the city’s population, shooting and killing each other at rates similar to blacks?

If you don’t tell the truth to yourself about the problem, you can never solve the problem! And the truth is that there is something in the urban black culture in the City of Brotherly Love — and let’s be honest here, in other large cities as well — which tells young black men that shooting each other is acceptable behavior.[2]The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s … Continue reading The killing of Sircarr Johnson, Jr, which the Inquirer did cover because he was a ‘somebody,’ had the shooters fire off more than 100 rounds toward a crowd at a cook-out, about as indiscriminate a killing action as one can imagine.

The Inquirer doesn’t report the truth because the #woke[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading there can’t handle the truth.

References

References
↑1 Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%.
↑2 The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
↑3 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
Posted on by

Killadelphia The not-so-subtle racism of an "anti-racist news organization"

As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, May 16th, there had been 196 homicides in Philadelphia. That having been the 136th day of the year, that worked out to 1.441 murders per day in the City of Brotherly Love, putting Philly on pace for 526 killings for 2021, if the average held.

That was a month ago. According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, as of the end of Tuesday, June 15th, the city hit what could wryly be called a milestone, it’s 250th murder. The math is pretty bad: 250 homicides ÷ 166 days = 1.506 per day, × 365 = 549.70 murders for the year. The evil, reich-wing Donald Trump has been out of office for just five days short of five months now, the very liberal, opposed to mass incarceration District Attorney Larry Krasner has been renominated, the pandemic restrictions have (mostly) been lifted, and Philly’s murder rate is increasing.

The city’s homicide record was 500, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990; 2020 saw Philly win the silver medal, with 499. But if the current rate continues, and there’s no sign that it won’t, 550 bodies in the city’s mean streets will break the record by a solid ten percent. Yet, at least as of 3:15 PM, there wasn’t a single story on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page about the three killings overnight, or the ‘milestone’ having been reached, though there was an important story on how the strategic use of wallpaper remains popular in area homes.

Another statistic: 250 homicides thus far in 2021 have eclipsed the entire year’s totals of 246 in 2013 and 248 in 2014, when Michael Nutter was Mayor, Charles Ramsey Police Commissioner and Seth Williams was District Attorney.[1]Seth Williams was convicted on one count of receiving bribes, so he isn’t exactly spotless, but his record as District Attorney was sound. Last year’s 499 homicides exceeded those two years’ total killings. Whatever Jim Kenney, Danielle Outlaw and Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer actually endorsed for renomination, have been doing has not worked.

#BlackLivesMatter, we are told, and Elizabeth Hughes, the publisher of the Inquirer, has said that her goal is to make the newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” but, as far as I can tell, black lives don’t matter to the Inquirer. It seems that the only stories the paper publishes are small police blotter reports, usually not on the website main page, unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal.

The vast majority of homicide victims in Philadelphia are black, but when one black gang banger kills another black gang banger, it isn’t really news anymore, not to the Inquirer. Instead, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?

It does not matter what Miss Hughes says about her goals, and it does not matter that the newspaper has its first Hispanic Executive Editor in Gabriel Escobar; the paper’s coverage shows us what they consider newsworthy. And black lives wasted are simply not newsworthy.

References

References
↑1 Seth Williams was convicted on one count of receiving bribes, so he isn’t exactly spotless, but his record as District Attorney was sound.
Posted on by

Solomon Jones on race

Despite my massive brainpower, I will admit to being unable to understand some people. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, and WURD radio host Solomon Jones would be one of those who baffles me.

Of the twenty Inquirer columns you will see if you click on the link in the above paragraph, sixteen are about race and racism. Mr Jones is an educated and successful man having been graduated, cum laude, with Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Temple University in 1997. He went on to be published in Essence, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine, and the Philadelphia Weekly. It doesn’t surprise me that his June 11th column is, again, about race, but what he wrote certainly does:

It’s time to support the Black men in Philadelphia being destroyed by gun violence

Our city needs to pay for job training, therapy, and other resources so that the streets aren’t young men’s only option.

By Solomon Jones | Friday, June 11, 2021

In the streets of Philadelphia, young Black men are the likeliest victims of gun violence, and they are dying at the hands of men who look like them. Some say this is evidence that racism has no role in the murders that have spread through our community like a virus. But that’s not true. Racism is at the core. It’s just hard to see that truth through all the blood.

I know this because I run the non-profit ManUpPHL. Through a simple initiative called Listening to the Streets, we’ve spent weeks talking to some of the men who come from the Philadelphia neighborhoods that are beset by gun violence. To put it more accurately, we’ve spent weeks listening to them. In doing so I have been humbled, because they’ve taught me how much I don’t know about what’s happening in the streets of my city. They’ve taught me the underlying reasons for the gun violence, and they’ve shown me that many of the solutions being bandied about will not work.

This is not to say no one is trying. In fact, the opposite is true. Many people and organizations are trying, including city officials seeking to spend $100 million to address gun violence. But not even that much funding will stop the bloodshed if it is simply thrown into old solutions that are not drawn from the streets.

There’s a lot more at the original, but one thing is clear: Mr Jones is an articulate man. It was what came next that surprised me:

What we see now is the end result of systemic racism. The most glaring example of that is the billions spent on segregated schools that hold back the Black community. Naicere Simmons, a 26-year-old man from North Philly who participated in Listening to the Streets, explained it this way.

“It’s like I go to school, I graduate school, the only job I can get is McDonald’s? For real? No, I’m cool. I’m going to the block. Ain’t nobody trying to finish all them years of school, and then they say, ‘Yeah, you got to go to a trade school and do two years over here, and then maybe you can get a job over there, or maybe you can do another two years and maybe you can get a job again.’

“Then these white companies and big construction companies, they got nephews, brothers, uncles, all that, that they grandfather went to school and just taught them that s–t. They didn’t go to trade school and all that. They was taught it. We don’t have it. Our mentors and father figures either dead or in jail.”

You know how you get a job in a construction company? You go to a jobsite and ask for one! You’ll start out as a laborer, but if you pay attention, if you try, you’ll learn, you’ll pick up things, and you can become something more than a manual laborer.[1]In Philadelphia’s heavily unionized environment, this might be more barriers to advancement. How do I know? That’s what I did!

So, Mr Simmons went to school, and was graduated from high school, but he can’t speak English! The only job he can get is working for McDonald’s? McDonald’s isn’t that bad; the turnover is high, so someone with drive and ambition can get ahead working for McDonald’s, if he’ll just try. Really, just what kind of better job will give him an opportunity if all he speaks is a pidgin English? And the articulate Mr Jones, in his column, told us why Mr Simmons wasn’t successful, simply by quoting him directly.

Mr Jones is not all wrong in his column. He contends that the money poured into Philadelphia’s schools is misspent, not stressing the right things.

So how do we solve the problem right now? Not by pouring money into recreation centers. Our participants told us that in the most violent neighborhoods, those centers are not safe. Not by pouring more money into schools that have failed repeatedly, no matter how much money they’ve received. Not by putting the money into traditional approaches that have done precious little to measurably reduce gun violence.

If we are to decrease gun violence, we must start by listening to the men who are living it. And then we must spend the money where it belongs — on them. Pay them to do on-the-job training in careers where there is room for advancement. Pay them to attend the therapy they need to overcome the trauma of the gun violence they have witnessed. Pay them to show their scars to the generations coming up behind them. Pay them to live.

An old friend of mine who had a plumbing business told me his secret to being able to make good money: it was because he was willing to stick his hands into other people’s [insert slang term for feces here]. That’s a nasty job, but by being willing to do that nasty work, he was earning what would today be six figures. Electricians? Electrical work isn’t fun; it can mean working out in the sun when it’s 100º or in unheated buildings when it’s 12º F outside. Pulling wire is no joke, and the detail work of connecting switches and circuit breaker boxes when your finger are numb from the cold is difficult, but if you can learn that trade, you can make decent money, and you’ll never be out of work.

And the most important skill of all is a simple one: the ability to go to work, on time, every day. It seems so simple, but it’s amazing how many people can’t do that.

Mr Jones is wrong about one thing: the education of children, regardless of sex or race, begins not at school but in the home. If the kids need to be ‘fixed’ by the time they get to school, it is almost always too late. The schools are not designed to fix kids; the schools are supposed to provide students who are already trying to take the right path with the tools they need to succeed on that path. Children need their fathers, living with and married to their mothers. The ones who don’t have that are behind from the very start.

References

References
↑1 In Philadelphia’s heavily unionized environment, this might be more barriers to advancement.
Posted on by

Apparently it’s racist not to hire a ‘professor’ to teach racism.

We have previously mentioned the train wreck known as Teen Vogue. If you click on an article, you’ll now get a blurb, saying “Politics, the Teen Vogue way,” which makes me ask: weren’t Vogue and Teen Vogue supposed to be about fashion and makeup? You can check out this story to get a clue about the intellectual heft of Teen Vogue.

Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards

This op-ed argues that university boards are really in control of many core functions on college and university campuses.

By Asheesh Kapur Siddique[1]Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst. | May 19, 2021

Do American universities lack ideological diversity? Are they bastions of left-wing thought and hostile to conservatives? In early April, the Crimson, the student newspaper of Harvard University, published an article asserting that the university’s conservative faculty are “an endangered species,” which quickly animated establishment concerns about the alleged lack of ideological diversity on American college campuses. But the right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true: The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.

Conservatives continually cite statistics suggesting that college professors lean to the left. But those who believe a university’s ideological character can be discerned by surveying the political leanings of its faculty betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how universities work. Partisan political preferences have little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms. There is no “Democrat” way to teach calculus,[2]Actually, there are plenty of people who believe that there is racism in the teaching of mathematics. nor is there a “Republican” approach to teaching medieval English literature; anyone who has spent time teaching or studying in a university knows that the majority of instruction and scholarship within cannot fit into narrow partisan categories. Moreover, gauging political preferences of employees is an impoverished way of understanding the ideology of an institution. To actually do so, you must look at who runs it — and in the case of the American university, that is no longer the professoriate.

Faculty once had meaningful power within higher educational institutions. In 1915, faculty at American universities organized themselves into the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which championed academic freedom and significant faculty participation in the administration of appointments, peer reviews, and curriculum — a principle that came to be known as “shared governance.” Though it was resisted by administrators and boards of trustees for much of the early 20th century, the shared governance model was cemented within the modern university in the post-World War II era. This was especially apparent in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, issued jointly by the American Council on Education, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the AAUP, which specified that faculty, administrators, and boards of trustees formed a “community of interest” that should share responsibilities to produce well-governed institutions.

But from the mid-1970s on, as the historian Larry Gerber writes, shared governance was supplanted as the dominant model of university administration as boards of trustees and their allies in the offices of provosts and deans took advantage of public funding cuts to higher education and asserted increasing control over the hiring of the professoriate. They imported business models from the for-profit corporate world that shifted the labor model for teaching and research from tenured and tenure-track faculty to part-time faculty on short-term contracts, who were paid less and excluded from the benefits of the tenure system, particularly the academic freedom that tenure secured by mandating that professors could only be fired for extraordinary circumstances.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, from his UMASS Amherst page.

There’s more at the original, but you can tell that Dr Siddique is a loony leftist when, on his personal website, that his “preferred gender pronouns are he / him / his / himself.”

Dr Siddique is so very concerned that colleges and universities, though the teaching staff are filled with liberals, are normally governed by boards of trustees, and those trustees are frequently representatives of the business, financial and legal communities. He doesn’t seem to understand: the boards of trustees aren’t there to teach, but to keep the school running. That means seeking donations and strong financial management.

The corporate capitalist regime that controls American university boards today has manufactured the current crisis of higher education by inflating tuition to compensate for state funding cuts while passing on the debt to students; hiring contingent rather than tenure-line staff to pay teachers less while withholding the security of academic freedom; and appointing administrators who are ultimately accountable to the regime.

Well, yes, of course: these are things necessary to keep colleges running. But Dr Siddique’s biggest complain is the one he put in parentheses, as though it was some kind of aside:

Case in point: The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees recently declined to appoint Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones to a tenure-track position following conservative outcry over her work on the 1619 project, documenting the history of slavery in the U.S. As one board member told NC Policy Watch, “This is a very political thing. …There have been people writing letters and making calls, for and against. But I will leave it to you which is carrying more weight.”

Let’s be honest here: Mrs Hannah-Jones does not have her doctorate, normally a requirement for a tenure-track position. More, he scholarship in writing her 1619 Project has been seriously questioned:

In the fall of 2019 the World Socialist Web Site interviewed four leading historians who had major problems with the 1619 Project. This included the leading historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Brown University’s Gordon Wood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the American Revolution, “couldn’t believe” that Hannah-Jones had argued that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery.[49] Princeton’s James M. McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for work on the Civil War, stated that he was “disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.”[50]

It’s a rather amusing take to think that the people of Massachusetts, who did not keep slaves, would have been the primary instigators of the American Revolution to protect slavery.[3]There were a few, with the emphasis on ‘few,’ New Englanders who benefitted from the slave trade, in that some of the slave ships were owned by New Englanders. More, slavery was perfectly legal in the British Empire, with the slave trade encouraged. Great Britain did not abolish slavery until 1833, more than half a century after our Revolution began, and our independence was won.

Is it any particular wonder that the University of North Carolina declined to award her a tenure-track position? UNC is like any major state university; it depends in part on alumni and supporter donations. Perhaps the Board of Trustees didn’t think it would be particularly helpful to alienate potential and continuing donors to have a tenure-track professor telling them how racist they were, or to have a faculty pushing the critical race theory.

References

References
↑1 Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst.
↑2 Actually, there are plenty of people who believe that there is racism in the teaching of mathematics.
↑3 There were a few, with the emphasis on ‘few,’ New Englanders who benefitted from the slave trade, in that some of the slave ships were owned by New Englanders.
Posted on by

The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make the Derek Chauvin trial about racism and stereotypes rather than the arrest of a criminal It seems that Cassie Owens doesn't like the fact that Mr Chauvin's defense attorney is actually trying to defend him

I confess: it might seem that my many referrals to The Philadelphia Enquirer Inquirer may seem close to an obsession, but, let’s face it, the paper seems to provide more silliness and stupidity every single day. You’ll love this one!

Stereotypes of larger Black men still persist at the Derek Chauvin trial

Research shows that big and tall Black men are more likely to be seen as threatening, and these notions trace back to slavery.

by Cassie Owens | April 9, 2021

During the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, Chauvin’s defense attorney Eric Nelson has repeatedly pointed to Floyd’s size.

Nelson raised size again Tuesday, when he confirmed with a police instructor that officers are trained to consider size difference for use of force. He first brought it up during opening statements in late March.

“You will see that three Minneapolis police officers could not overcome the strength of Mr. Floyd,” Nelson said. “Mr. Chauvin stands five-foot-nine, 140 pounds. Mr. Floyd is six, three, weighs 223 pounds.”

In the conversations around victims of police brutality, pointing to a victim’s size to justify or disregard the violence has become a feature, not a bug. Prominent examples include Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, and Michael Brown. But why is size so often mentioned in these cases?

Uhhh, maybe because all of these suspects were big men? If you do a Google search for George Floyd gentle giant you’ll get 2,690,000 results, including George Floyd: “Gentle Giant” Who Became Symbol Of Fight Against Racism, which lists Mr Floyd’s height as 6’4″, not 6’3″, Friends Remember George Floyd As A Gentle Giant, and George Floyd was ‘very loving’ and a ‘gentle giant,’ friends and family say.

Read more: The Chauvin trial so far, by John Hinderaker on Powerline.

When I searched for eric garner gentle giant, I got 878,000 results, including Friends: Eric Garner was a ‘gentle giant’, ‘Gentle Giant’ Dies After NYPD Cop Puts Him In Chokehold, and Friends: Man in NYC chokehold case ‘gentle giant’. The latter article stated that Mr Garner was 6-foot-3, and 350-pounds.

St George of Floyd

My search for alton sterling gentle giant yielded 480,000 returns, including returns which noted that he was a convicted felon, was brandishing a firearm at police when he was killed, and a registered sex offender for knocking up a 14 year old girl; he had a long criminal record and spent much of his life behind bars. Giant maybe; gentle, not so much.

My search for michael brown gentle giant yielded 8,270,000 results in 0.69 seconds, including Michael Brown remembered as a ‘gentle giant’, and Brown Remembered As a Gentle Giant, even though Mr Brown, all 6’4″ of him, was caught on video roughing up an elderly shopkeeper during a robbery just minutes before his ‘encounter’ with Officer Darrin Wilson.

So, why was the size of these criminals — and let’s make no bones about it, they were criminals — mentioned? Because they were all large men, men who used their size for physical advantage.

Back to the Inquirer:

Anna Mollow, a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based disabilities studies expert who sees similarities in the cases of Barbara Dawson and Tamir Rice, said in a recent interview this reflects forms of oppression that are familiar in our society.

“I would, indeed, say that the defense’s comments about George Floyd’s size do draw upon, and do recirculate, stereotypes of Black people as possessing superhuman physical strength,” wrote Mollow, “while at the same time calling up dehumanizing stereotypes about Black people’s supposed moral and intellectual inferiority — for example, the notion that they need to be brought ‘under control,’ as Chauvin said of Floyd.”

Cassie Owens, the Inquirer article author, is trying to claim that Eric Nelson, Derek Chauvin’s defense attorney, was playing on stereotypes, but Mr Nelson is doing his job the best he can, in trying to defend his client. It is not playing a stereotype to note that George Floyd, a drug-addled convicted felon caught in the act of passing counterfeit money, was significantly larger than Officer Chauvin. At 5’9″, Officer Chauvin was very much of average height, in the 50th percentile of adult male height, while the 99th percentile begins at 6’3½”, roughly where Mr Floyd stood. Mr Floyd outweighed Mr Chauvin by roughly 80 lb, more than half again the officer’s mass.

Miss Owens is, of course, utterly appalled that Mr Nelson is doing something really radical like defending his client.

Ben Brooks, a diversity and inclusion expert who was one of the first Black officers to enlist in the Pennsylvania State Police in 1961, said that bias, in general society, isn’t well understood. People use bias to detect danger, Brooks continued, and for some, their danger detectors don’t respond fairly to Black people. . . .

“If you approach [an] individual with dignity, respect, and self worth, then you’re on an even keel,” he said. “But when it’s anything other than that, that means psychologically the temperature rises.”

Empathy, he said, is critical for officers: “When you can approach members of the public with an empathic approach, you’re more likely to make an emotional connection and see them on a human level.”

(Anna Mollow, a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based disabilities studies expert) noted that it was important to be mindful of how different forms of oppression, like racism and sizeism, intersect. Thinking that way, she said, invites more space for self-criticism for everyone across groups, rather than thinking confrontationally: “It’s more about continuing to really explore the way that we might be perpetuating forms of oppression without realizing it, and then to explore the ways that we can work together and change that.”

In all of this, in all of her attempts to paint Mr Floyd as a victim of racism and stereotypes, Miss Owens, whose Inquirer bio says, “I cover sociocultural dynamics, as well as how Philadelphians contend with them these days,” ignores that Officer Chauvin was called to the scene by the officers who arrived there first, noting that Mr Floyd was acting drugged up. Mr Chauvin would already have been on alert when he arrived, in that the suspect was described as acting erratically and irrationally, and was resisting arrest.

Yes, Officer Chauvin (probably) was “thinking confrontationally,” given that he was called as backup to a confrontation with a resisting perpetrator. While it is certainly arguable that Officer Chauvin used excessive force against Mr Floyd — that Mr Floyd dies while being restrained certainly makes the officers’ actions subject to question — this trial is about the proper use of force against a resisting criminal suspect, not about racism. But the left want to make it about racism, so they’ll have yet another excuse to riot and loot and burn if Mr Chauvin is acquitted or even just convicted on a lesser charge than second-degree murder.