Shorter Mayor de Blasio: Giuliani Clueless on Race Issues

Two Italian guys, two New York City Mayors, two totally different views on reality. Mayor de Blasio, a liberal Democrat, has attempted to abandon race-based policing that former Mayor Giuliani became famous for. Crime is dropping in New York City too. Of course, Rudy Giuliani is talking about how the black community needs to change, or something, too. That prompted Mayor de Blasio to knock him out on this subject:

"I think he fundamentally misunderstands the reality," DeBlasio said about Giuliani on ABC's "This Week." "We're trying to bring police and community together. There is a problem here. There is a rift here that has to be overcome,"

"You cannot look at the incident in Missouri, another incident in Cleveland, Ohio and another incident in New York City all happening in the space of weeks and act like there's not a problem," he continued. "There's something fundamental we have to get at here. And it's not going to be helped by accusing either the community or the police of having bad intention or not doing their job. In fact, I think everyone is trying to do their job."

Giuliani looks at the Garner case, at the Ferguson case, at all the other controversial cases, and sees no problem. He sees no problem that an increasingly large minority population feels like the police are not treating them correctly. That's kind of sick and twisted, but then again, so was Giuliani's "get tough" policy in New York. Mayor de Blasio has the vision to see that you can't leave a huge chunk of society feeling as though they're not represented. He sees that this issue needs to be resolved. It's why New York is lucky to have him. 

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Ben Carson Loves Re-Writing History

Not real, but hilarious anyway.

Latest Ben Carson stupidity:

“I honestly think things were better before this president was elected. And I think that things have gotten worse because of his unusual emphasis on that.”

I'd love to know what drugs this guy takes, honestly. This stuff is so crazy that I can't believe he's just saying it. President Obama's election meant so much to this country, and showed so much about this country's progress (far from a finished product) on race relations. This imbecile thinks we'd have been better off without it, on race relations specifically. I'm not sure what world he's living in, but it's not a reality based one. 

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Why?

A lot of people have asked me why I care so much about Ferguson, or immigration reform, or issues that "don't effect me?" I'm a white, straight, raised-Catholic, upper-middle-class, male. Shouldn't I be worried about buying guns or something?

I don't view politics hyper-racially, nor do I look at the issues facing the country as racially exclusive. Lots of white people are suffering through battles with banks over the mortgage, or under-employment, or a failing public school for their child, or our crumbling infrastructure, or.... I could go on and on. White people suffer through the problems in America too, and I think that progressive solutions to these problems, or as I view them, collectivism, will improve their lives. So I find no issue here.

But since the insinuation is there, let's run with the ball. Whether it be predatory lenders, unequal pay for women compared to men, the crumbling infrastructure of our country, the problems of our public schools, or any of the major problems of America, the Republican Party refuses to solve them. They say government is not the answer, period, and refuse to solve any problems. And, well, white people vote for them. From Reagan forward, Republicans have won the white vote by clear margins in every Presidential Election, even against Presidents Clinton and Obama. White voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for the 1994, 2010, and 2014 mid-term landslides the GOP won. So yeah, a lot of the problems are self-inflicted.

Further more, by an even more stupid margin than the population as a whole, they tell us we're on the wrong track. They do so as many live on an acre lot in the suburbs, with two kids, two dogs, two cars, and two credit cards (at least). They do so as they drive on a paved road, have professional police men protecting them, have modern sewage systems, a first-class military protecting their nation from foreign invasion, generally safe food to eat and water to drink, and live in a nation with a very high standard of living. I know that our high standard of living doesn't mean we're on the right track now, but over 75% of people living in these first-world conditions are all having bad years?

Again, I don't view politics and governance as a racial thing. I think good policy brings about good outcomes for everyone. I guess though, if the question is why, I'm gonna give an answer.

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What People Miss About American Race Relations

There's basically two attitudes about race in America:

• The (mostly white) attitude is that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s mostly solved the problems we can solve on race, and now you can't wipe out individual attitudes, but at least we're all formally equal.
• The (mostly progressive) attitude is that we're still living in the Civil Rights movement, and that today's work is an extension of the work of the likes of Martin Luther King Jr.

Both are wrong.

Schools, lunch counters, military units, and all public services are no longer segregated. In short, Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement worked. We can say today that under the "black and white" of the law, equality across races has been achieved. For all intents and purposes, much of King's work was finished. There are areas of workers rights and the dignity of the poor which were not, but some would consider that to be separate from knocking down segregation laws and their like.

The problem we face today on race is less about formal law and more about areas that are tougher to govern. When Darren Wilson calls Michael Brown a "demon," or any of the similar cases where white (or just non-black) people assign super-human powers to African-Americans who they shoot (remember, George Zimmerman's story on why he had to shoot Trayvon Martin?), is that this not an attitude that can be struck down by law. Our stereotypes of African-Americans cause us to de-humanize them:

So, it's no wonder non-Americans tend to think that real life in the US is just like it is in violent Hollywood movies - because it often is. But this doesn't mean that other countries have picked up our bad habit of frantically demonising blacks in the news. Watching foreign news treatment of Michael Brown is particularly illuminating. In Japan, newscasters call him "Brown-san", using the honorific suffix "-san" out of respect. In Mexican coverage, he's referred to as a "joven", in Brazil, a "jovem", in Taiwan, a "xiaonian" - all words for a "young man". In other words, he is treated as a person.

But in the US, we are warned that Michael Brown "was no angel". We are told that he made rap songs. We are reminded that he was quite tall (just as tall as his killer), and a bit overweight (this part makes him scary). Fox News has worked to cast doubt on whether he was headed to college or not. Any facade of humanity that Brown might have had has been stripped away, all the better to show us the terrifying monster within.

Think about that all for a moment. Michael Brown "was no angel?" Ok, neither am I, but I bet I'm not getting shot over a cheap pack of cigars. Michael Brown had no criminal record, and yet an altercation was needed to get him for taking a pack of cigars. That's over-policing. That would not be done to me.

Which leads to my point- the problem we have with race relations in America today are the applications of our law towards African-Americans, as driven by white attitudes about African-Americans. If a white kid in a suburb stills a pack of cheap cigars and the cops catch him, chances are  they get a slap on the wrist, or just taken home to dad. If a black kid in suburban St. Louis gets caught doing the same thing, there's an altercation and a shooting. Our law is not applied equally. We find that justice is not blind at all. Justice has eyes that are wide opened.

It's why the sentence for cooked cocaine, or crack, a "black" drug, are worse than the sentence for regular cocaine, a drug white people use more. It's why we use "standardized tests" to help determine school funding, which tend to favor wealthier (whiter) school districts. It's why transportation funding bills tend to favor new roads from the suburbs to the jobs in the cities, rather than mass transit. I could go on and on. All of this is driven by attitudes. Those attitudes effect the application of law.

We're past the days of poll taxes and open uses of the N-word. We're past the days where people can openly support racism. We're past the time of open legal use of racism. While that's all great, if you stack the deck against African-American people, if they think that their lives don't really matter in this country, isn't that just as bad, if not worse?

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