Tag Archives: violence

Is it Mere “Blackness” or a Violent “Southernness”

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So I was reading an article on Vox critiquing this book by Barry Latzer, “The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America”, which blames African-Americans’ import of “violent black culture” for the rise in urban crime following the end of the Great Migration in the 1960s.

Then the article mentions that Latzer ties “Black culture” to violent White Southern culture, also known as the “Southern culture of honor” studied by Richard Nesbitt and Dov Cohen. The article mentions that this hypothesis has been touted by Thomas Sowell.

Really? Thomas Sowell? The Black supply-side conservative academic who has compared President Obama to Hitler more than once?

Oy.

So apparently, Sowell wrote in the title essay of his 2005 book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” that “black ghetto culture” is a relic of the highly dysfunctional white southern redneck culture which emanated from the “Cracker culture” of Northern England (among the livestock herders of the border between England and Scotland) and the Scots-Irish of Northern Ireland. Sowell attributes the following to this entire cultural lineage from England to Southern Black America:

“an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship,… and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.”

Sowell contrasts this cultural lineage against the cultural lineage which emanated from farmers and more urbane types in lower England to what became New England, which emphasized a “Protestant work ethic”, literacy, civic participation, entrepreneurship in a wider number of economic activity, and quieter religious observance. He extends this latter culture – positively – to African-American antebellum New Englanders and Afro-Caribbean migrants.

Sowell, Nesbitt and Cohen all attribute to both White Southern and Black Southern cultures a greater degree of possession-driven violence and aggressive mentalities, both of which negatively impacted Black Southern culture through violent racist, anti-Black regimes and led Southern African-Americans to import this violent culture to urban areas in the North in the 20th century.

But I didn’t know that Sowell is of this opinion that “Black American culture” or “ghetto culture” as we know it now is a relic of White Southern culture. I know that he tends to spar against liberal strawpeople to make his point and preach to the choir, but I would say that his indictment of Black American culture can just as well be an indictment of White Southern culture and its political manifestations against generations of African-Americans in the South.

The Racism of Chicago in the White Conservative’s Mind

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Something I’ve noticed: certain demographics from outside of Chicago love to describe Chicago’s African-American population and neighborhoods as a Third World country, like it is Hell on Earth.

Apparently, it’s not so “dark”, dysfunctional and evil of a place that most of the European-Americans in Chicago proper flee in droves from the city.

In fact, despite decades of petty gang-gun violence largely concentrated in the African-American population, it’s still the third largest city in the United States.

Maybe most of the African-American population is tucked away in a certain physical memory hole called the South Side, where murders happen and outsiders cynically tsk-tsk the surviving residents (or burnish their 2nd Amendment grievances with the bloody cloth of Black gun violence, or rage against the “niggers” and “race pimps” sullying the good name of yet another nice city) before moving on with their day?

Maybe deindustrialization happened, making life harder and encouraging many who had their highest skills in manual labor to turn to drugs, which entailed a turn to the violence which follows?

Maybe the culture of honor in the White South was adopted by us early in our belated freedom, and was brought by us to places like Chicago during the Great Migration when we should have left it in Jim Crow Land?

Nah, none of that could possibly be true! Chicago is just our sideshow, our American Mordor! Let’s always talk about Chicago’s Black people as if they are all crazy, evil and feral, and then pin that on President Obama like we’ve done since 2007.

It Isn’t Good That Police Shoot Twice as Many Unarmed White Civilians as Black Civilians

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If police kill twice as many unarmed European-Americans as they do African-Americans, isn’t that a problem with police, too? Shouldn’t the police be fixed to stop killing so many people across the country?

Why do you think there are so many White sovereign citizens who proclaim themselves to not be subject to American law? Why do you think that anarchist/libertarian White guys run Cop Block and Photography Is Not A Crime! in direct and sustained critique of police behavior?

Don’t be so cluelessly self-absorbed as to think that only Black, or only liberal, or only “SJW” people are raging against law enforcement abuse.

It’s not just #BlackLivesMatter. It’s not just #Kaepernick.

It’s also #StopKillingUs.

“We are twice as likely to have a firearm in our homes as black Americans and Hispanics, yet significantly less of us die by gunshot. White people represent 65 percent of the population but just 25 percent of gun homicides. Black people represent 13 percent of the population yet a disturbing 55 percent of gun homicides.

Our gun obsession is simply fueled by the fact that the odds are in our favor. Black and brown kids in Chicago, Baltimore and Miami die by bullets at a much greater rate than our children in Montana, Idaho and Wisconsin.

The color of our skin makes up most of the Republican Party, a party twice as likely to own guns at home than the Democratic Party.

People who look like me are ultimately responsible that a third of all Americans with children under 18 at home have a gun in their household, including 34 percent of families with children younger than 12.

We make up 80 percent of Congress. The majority of white lawmakers refuse to make it legally harder to buy firearms, even AR-15 assault rifles that no respectable hunter would ever use to bag a 12-point buck.”

Source: America’s nostalgic gun culture defies logic and common sense – The Undefeated

Idiotic Assumptions About Crime in Poor Black Communities

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There is something wrong with the premise behind the statement “Black lives don’t matter to #BlackLivesMatter” and (mis)using FBI stats to back it up, as the always-ill-informed Milo Yiannopoulos has done.

It assumes that African-Americans are not doing anything to reduce violent offenses in predominately African-American urban areas, despite the evidence to the contrary that Yiannopoulos simply ignores.

The “solutions” to “Black-on-black crime” put forward by those most extremely critical of the anti-police brutality protests are usually embarrassingly parochial, petty and emphasizing upon a moral policing of African-Americans which would never reasonably happen to White Americans.

The “solutions” are usually harder militarization of the inner-city police, harder prosecution of the Drug War, re-introducing religious control into the public school system and civil government, encouraging corporal violence against children, shaming single parents, and powerless obeisance to the force of arms.

None of these will bring back the manufacturing jobs. None of these will address our mental health crisis. None of these will fix our collapsing infrastructure. None of these will empower us with democratic power. None of these will address how, as an ethnicity descended from slaves, we ended up here in the wrong way. None of these will fix our education system’s lack of scale. None of these will address how we feel trapped in our own cities in the underclass.

They’re just crap solutions. Meaningless, nostalgic platitudes to violently-flawed bygones. Hypocritical des to a hypocritical culture which masks its violent stench as it condemns Black people for our terrors.

And what’s worse is that the same people who propose these “solutions” do not institutionally benefit from these solutions either! They screw over other White people!

Sad!

I fear that one of my relatives will die by the savagery of the police, or by the gun-happiness of their own neighbors. #StLouis is a soul-crushing metro area, and my relatives reflect its unhappiness. I don’t like going there. There’s very little that is redeemable about it. I associate STL with relatives being on drugs or mentally ill or illiterate or in overcrowded, rundown houses or religious crazies or in-and-out of jail; the fried rice from the Chinese corner shops are the sole upside. I’m not surprised that the people are coming to violent blows there. #Ferguson #STL

Why I didn’t watch #MarcheRepublicaine today

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France is a former colonial power which fought a bitter war against nationalists in Algeria. Most Muslims in France are from Algeria, North Africa and most former French colonies in Africa. Most Afro-French Muslims live in poor “suburbs” on the outskirts of cities like Paris.

France has long played a role in destabilizing and propping up dictatorships in their former African colonies/client states. Chronic racism against Africans and Arabs within France + a paternalistic, antidemocratic attitude abroad = radicalization.

The paternalistic and violent history of UK, France and US in Sunni Muslim Arab, African states gives us our current world. Let’s talk about “freedom of speech” when we begin to listen to speech of those who come from politically-broken peoples. Until then, is masturbatory, self-congratulatory, opportunistic, jingoistic nonsense from a country that hasn’t addressed its violently-bigoted history.

The bodies of innocent dead are not yet cold while the defense of historically-racist French “way of life” is ratcheted upward for the world. Attacks like that on and their attackers are useless, wasteful and bloody expressions of ethnic derangement. But that derangement has a long history and does not comes from a deep, dark vacuum.

If we’re so concerned about threats to the French, or European, or U.S. or Canadian “way of life” by way of violent, rhetorically-explosive Sunni Muslim protests against cartoons of Muhammad of Quraysh, then why is it that we Westerners station militaries in, and bomb the shit out of, predominately-Muslim countries? If we’re so concerned about threats to our freedoms, why is it that we’re so glad to invest militarily in conflicts in these regions? If the French people are so concerned about safety and civil peace, why does France go out of its way to maintain corrupt post-colonial relationships with dictatorships and support violent interventions in order to keep post-colonial borders largely intact?

Why is it that we practically invest into the undoing of former colonies as well as, by indirect way of when citizens of these post-colonial states migrate to countries like France, our own undoing?

Why can’t we in the West practice abroad what we preach at home?

We don’t have to have hypocrites in leadership or violently-hypocritical foreign policies. We can enforce our own absolute neutrality in foreign policy and let the chips fall as they may. We can stop investing militarily in post-colonial conflicts. France can end its “Francafrique” relationship with terrible governments on the African continent. We can stop being so invested in the instability of nations, which could result in troubled migrants being invested in their home countries and stable governances there.

But that would take us taking the thumb out of our assholes, stop pitying about our “decline”, rethinking our status quo and treating Black and Brown lives with more dignity, wouldn’t it?

Wiley Drake’s “imprecatory prayers” as autoterrorism

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Still thinking about Wiley Drake long after his notorious pronouncement of imprecatory prayer upon Obama’s life.  

I’m wondering, though, about how befuddled the immediate reaction against Drake’s announcement became, as the reaction varied between "This is Abrahamic religion in the raw" to "well, he’s not encouraging others to pray the same prayer, but it still could inflame violent opinion or reaction against Obama".

Now let’s think about it: Drake was officially entitled by the 1st amendment to pray this prayer for himself as long as he didn’t communicate this as a desire for other people to act upon (which could be described as "incitement to murder", or if there is a monetary incentive, "solicitation of murder"). However, that the reaction against the idea of an imprecatory prayer – where you pray to your preferred imaginary friend or imaginary surrogate parent to wreak havoc upon another individual’s life or livelihood so that you don’t have to – tends to exhibit the continuing fear within the public of incitement of the supernatural to harm a mortal individual.

But if, from an atheist standpoint, such incitements of imaginary beings are only being directed to a memory or concept within one’s mind, and that the violent thought is only involving the burning of an effigy within one’s mind rather than a public effigy burning, then maybe this burning or killing of one’s enemy within one’s mind counts as "autoterrorism", or terrorism against one’s own self.

It can be considered an act against the self because it dedicates the mind’s resources to killing one’s own concept of a living being through incitement of the imagination to that effect. Since this does not involve any mock killing of an effigy in public or the solicitation/incitement to the public to kill a living person, then the act of terrorism only takes place within the mind against an externally-influenced product of the mind. This playout of terroristic acts by the mind against its own production can only be described as terrorism against the self if the skeptical outside observer ignores or denies the existence of supernatural beings.

So prayer, when directed toward the solicitation of murder by a supernatural being, is meant as a reinforcement toward the mind’s own action of terrorism against its own concepts of an individual or group. Imprecatory prayer (including curses) can be best described as autoterrorism.