Title : For The Doubters
link : For The Doubters
For The Doubters
It can be hard, very hard indeed, to persuade the willfully disbelieving – the sort of person who demands that the evidence not be there, or that the implications not be plain and unavoidable – that something unpleasant is happening to which he must pay attention. If the subject has a relatively mild degree of significance to anyone, you can dismiss a difference of conviction as something tolerable. But if it’s a matter of real importance, perhaps even life and death, to you or someone you love, you can build up a great deal of frustration trying to crack that wall of disbelief.
Unfortunately, the greater the importance of an unpleasant subject, the higher and thicker will be the disbeliever’s wall.
Maybe it wasn’t always this way. Maybe when we were less comfortable, less accustomed to safety and prosperity and more aware of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” we resisted bad tidings and their implications less determinedly. After all, they happened repeatedly, and to people we know. We couldn’t hide our eyes from them all the time; we had to accept their place in our world and their mechanisms of origin.
But as people’s lives have lengthened, as we’ve become accustomed to convenience, as our pleasures have grown more affordable, as medical science has refined its ability to repair our ailments and relieve our sufferings, we’ve lost a great part of that awareness. We’ve distanced ourselves from the more unpleasant aspects of temporal existence, such that when they impinge upon us we react with bafflement if not anger: Can such outrages still happen to decent people in this Year of Our Lord 2020?
Yes. Yes, they most certainly can and do – and they always will. For as long as men must linger under the veil of time, there will be pain. There will be sorrow and loss. There will be death. And there will be outrages that demand our attention and our correction, if we’re serious about considering ourselves better than the savages.
Of course, that last conditional clause embeds a question of itself.
The United States at this time is approximately 70% Euro-Caucasian, 13% Hispano-Caucasian, 13% Negro, and 4% Mongolian or “Pacific.” Those are hard numbers. They give the lie to those who claim that for America to become a “minority white” nation is “inevitable.” 83% of Americans are of the Caucasian race – i.e., white. Even if we omit the Hispanics, which some prefer to do for reasons divorced from race, and consider only Caucasians of European descent to be “white,” the figure remains at 70%: a strong majority.
Our racial troubles arise from the 13% Negro fraction of our populace. Those troubles swell to a head and burst whenever a non-Negro law enforcer kills a Negro criminal or suspect. Nothing comparable occurs when a Negro law enforcer kills a non-Negro criminal or suspect. Indeed, those killings are hardly even mentioned in the regional papers.
But hark! What have we here?
Some of the most comprehensive information we have comes from a 2001 Bureau of Justice Statistics report examining incidents where police in the United States used deadly force to kill criminal suspects between 1976 and 1998. During that 23-year span, 42% of all suspects killed by police were black – a figure that comported precisely with the percentage of violent crimes committed by African Americans during that same period. This is enormously significant because we would expect that in police forces not plagued by systemic racism, officers would shoot suspects of various racial or ethnic backgrounds at rates closely resembling their respective involvement in the types of serious crimes most likely to elicit the use of force by police. And indeed, that is exactly what the evidence shows.Moreover, in nearly two-thirds of all justifiable homicides by police during 1976-98, the officer’s race and the suspect’s race were the same. When a white or Hispanic officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually (63% of the time) white or Hispanic as well. And when a black officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually black (81% of the time).
How about the rate at which officers killed suspects of other racial or ethnic backgrounds? In 1998, the “black-officer-kills-black-felon” rate was 32 per 100,000 black officers, more than double the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed black felons (14 per 100,000). That same year, the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed white or Hispanic felons (28 per 100,000) was much higher than the “black-officer-kills-white-or-Hispanic-felon” rate of 11 per 100,000.
ATTENTION: I went to considerable difficulty to preserve those links. Follow them. Always check a commentator’s assertion of fact, especially one that has unpleasant implications. Insist on confirmations from independent sources. If you can dispute his facts, you can dismiss his implications – but the inverse is also true: If you cannot dispute his facts, you cannot dismiss his implications; you must attack his reasoning, which is usually a much more difficult proposition.
So: I contend, with John Perazzo, that if law enforcement is the subject, then there is no problem of “systemic racism” as the racialist hucksters have alleged. Descriptions of the suspect overwhelmingly match those convicted of the crimes attributed to them. From the statistics above, police uses of force, including lethal force, match their needs to use force when subduing members of the recognized races.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be any outrages. Owing to the conflicts between the two autopsies performed, we still don’t know whether George Floyd’s death should be attributed to the police action in subduing him. However, let’s stipulate – i.e., accept for the sake of argument – that the knee-on-the-neck treatment really did kill Floyd. Does that incident, isolated from the statistics above, justify the hucksters’ claims of systematic white-on-black police brutality?
I say that it does not.
Despite the figures above, America is in the middle of a race war: i.e., a violent conflict founded on racial grievances, whether justified or not. While some of the rioters are white, the conflict is over race and racial animosities: if there were no racial grievances, there would be no race-related agitation and no race-based conflict. So far the violence has been semi-localized to cities with significant black populations, though it is not guaranteed to remain so.
How does a nation end a race war – an internal race war?
Does it matter whether or not the allegations of “institutional racism” are accurate?
Indeed, do the American conceptions of rights and justice bear any relevance whatsoever to the conflicts and violence of the day?
The fomenters of the conflict are uninterested in ending the war. They’re indifferent to the facts on the ground that refute the allegations of systemic white-on-black racism. Nor are they concerned with rights or justice as Americans understand them. The race war in progress is one they’ve labored mightily to evoke. It’s their tool for the overthrow of the American economic, social, and political order.
This renders any conceptually American response – i.e., rights and justice-based – to the race war ineffective ab initio. What other approaches exist that the great majority of Americans would accept? Is it possible to halt the war and restore peace without actually fighting and winning it? Were American whites to rise to the occasion, meet violence with violence, and ultimately prevail, what would necessarily follow?
Are these possibilities and considerations too ugly to address open-eyed? Is the willful disbelief evinced by the white majority insuperable? Are we irreversibly resolved to insist that if we just bar our doors, close our eyes, and wait long enough, it will all “go away?”
Only one avenue that does not involve purging or expelling the entire Negro fraction of the American population from these shores is even imaginable: seeking out the fomenters, of whatever race, and putting them to the sword swiftly and publicly. What chance does it have?
It’s been said by others that starting a riot is easy but scheduling, controlling, or ending one is not. This has the ring of truth. The riots are in progress. They have their own dynamic. The fomenters had the riots as their object. Having achieved it, they’re either working to sustain and enlarge the riots or (figuratively) watching from the sidelines. Yet even if they had an interest in shutting the violence down, how does one “foment” the end of a riot? By what technique – and this presumes that the forces of order could somehow enlist the fomenters in this cause – could an enraged mob be systematically, effectively “de-enraged?”
If you’re inclined to believe, as I do, that no such approach exists, then what remains? Only punishment. Let’s imagine that some “core group” of fomenters and organizers of the riots could be identified and captured. Would anything the American justice system could do to them have the desired effect?
That seems a longshot. I’d love to be wrong about that, as it strikes me as the last strategic possibility remaining to us that doesn’t involve eliminating the Negro fraction of the American populace. The federal government, which has blanket authority over the subjects of terrorism and insurrection, must try it, swiftly and resolutely.
Should that fail, what will remain is the hoof-and-mouth disease cure. That remedy is a terrible one. However, it has this virtue: it is effective. There is a threshold level of disruption and destruction which, should we pass it, will put it into practice.
I dislike writing about this subject. I wanted to believe in the possibility of interracial amity for many years. I’m as appalled as anyone over what has come to pass. But I’m not a dewy-eyed idealist who sticks flowers into gun barrels or believes that chanting Kumbaya can bring about world peace and human harmony. Most important of all, I respect the evidence...and the evidence tells a bleak tale.
It does not matter whether the differences between the white and black races brought us to this pass, or whether it’s a consequence of history and the exploitation of carefully nurtured resentments by evil forces. We are where we are, not somewhere else. The problem must be solved – and whereas most things commentators characterize as “problems” that require “solutions” are really only immutable conditions that express natural laws, this one is soluble. Whether we have the clarity, fortitude, and perseverance to solve it remains to be seen.
Pray.
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