Race, Obama & Reaction To The Chicago Kidnapping and Torture (Updated)

chicago-kidnapping-regularOn the heels of the crimes committed by four black teens in Chicago who kidnapped and tortured an autistic white man (and each of whom have now been charged with hate crimes (one for race, one for disability), kidnapping, and battery with a deadly weapon) President Obama has claimed to have improved race relations during his time in office.  To examine that claim, let’s first take a look at the reaction to the crimes and the charges against the Chicago teens in media and social media.

CNN’s  Don Lemon disagreed with his panel guest Matt Welsh when Welsh called the black teens’ actions “evil.”  Instead, Lemon attributed the criminal acts to their youth and “bad home training . . . I have no idea who is raising these young people because no one I know on earth who is 17-years-old or 70-years-old would ever think of treating another person like that, and you wonder, at 18-years-old, where is the parent?”  Talk about a non-sequitur.  Lemon would relieve these feral monsters of any moral blame for their acts because of bad potty training?  But many on the progressive left seem to agree with Mr. Lemon.

That aside, shouldn’t Mr. Lemon  have been asking about parents in the plural.  The single greatest indicator of how a child will fare as an adult, from education to income to criminality and more, is whether the child is raised in a two parent household.  That puts into some perspective the fact that over 70% of black children are born and raised by unwed mothers.  Indeed, this is the wellspring from which the majority of issues in the dysfunctional lower economic half of black society emanate.

Also on the same CNN Panel with Don Lemon was Symone Sanders, a black woman whose most recent employment of note was as the national press secretary for Bernie the Red.  Her take:

“We’ve talked about white nationalists and white supremacists and the KKK, but there also, when this inflammatory rhetoric is out there, when someone is repeatedly telling you that your community is the worst of the worst, it brings out the worst of the worst in people.”

So, any criticism of the black community is the cause of blacks acting out their frustrations by torturing a mentally disabled white man?  Actually, there is a point to be gleaned from her scurrilous opinion.  Progressives are so deeply in need of keeping blacks voting Democrat that they claim all white non-prog America is collectively responsible for historic acts of racism by people long dead, and that in any event, all white America is blatantly racist even to this day.  That despite a lack of any open and obvious racism on all but the fringes of society.  There is no effort to take responsibility for their actions, only an effort to place blame so that they do not have to fix their problems.  Thus do we have BLM on one hand claiming that blacks major problem is racist police, and on the other hand, academia schooling children and young adults in grievance theater and pushing the theory that all whites are inherently racist (except for the white Dems in need of their vote).  To call this merely toxic is a grotesque understatement.  And indeed, when the four criminals say “f*** white people” and “f*** Donald Trump,” it is a safe bet they have been spoon fed that hatred in their communities.

White “I can pass” race hustler Shaun King went into a long rant over why he will “not be fighting for justice” for the young white man who was victimized by the four feral blacks.  Among his many claims:

What we are witnessing here is that fact that when particular African-Americans commit a crime, many whites use the crime to cast aspersions and stereotype all black folk. It’s a ridiculous double standard rooted in racism and oppression.

So we are back to the claim that any observation that reflects critically on blacks as being racism and oppression.  My, the FBI must be incredibly racist, because I just looked up their most recent numbers on homicides in America.  Blacks account for 12.6% of the U.S. populationIn 2015, the estimated number of murders in the nation was 15,696.  Almost half of those murder victims, 7,039, were blacks.  A third of the nation’s homicides in 2015 remain unsolved.  As to those 10,539 cases where the race of the offender is known, 5,620, or over half, were committed by blacks.

Then there is this opinion piece at WaPo, one that Legal Insurrection correctly identifies as a piece of “pathalogical misdirection.  This from Wapo:

Pro-Trump narratives converge in one awful attack streamed on Facebook

If you believe discrimination against white people is rampant, that Donald Trump supporters face persecution, that Chicago is a war zone, and the media is dishonest, then your entire worldview is likely to be confirmed by one awful story. . . .

The message in conservative media is clear: Reverse discrimination — particularly against white Trump voters — is a big problem that the liberals in the media refuse to acknowledge. Oh, and by the way, Chicago (the part inhabited mostly by black people, anyway) is a super-dangerous place, just like Trump said.” . . .

“If this had been done to an African American by four whites, every liberal in the country would be outraged, and there’d be no question but that it’s a hate crime,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday morning on Fox News. He added his belief that “there has been a dramatic rise in racial tension under President Obama.”

Gingrich might be right about different reactions, but he conveniently ignores the reason. If the attackers had been white and the victim had been black, the incident would have, of course, conjured America’s ugly history of white mobs committing violence against black people. There is no parallel history of the reverse happening on anything remotely approaching the same scale.

What world is this man living in?  Has he forgotten the black knockout game targeting whites and asians.  Or perhaps he just didn’t pay any attention to the black flash mob violence of the past several years.  This from Heather MacDonald writing in 2015:

In fact, white violence against blacks is dwarfed by black on white violence. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide) against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population. Both the absolute number of incidents and the rate of black-on-white violence are therefore magnitudes higher than white-on-black violence. . . .

If you are wondering why this comes from a private organization based on “special tabulations” from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, it is because the Bureau of Justice Statistics stopped making public any break outs of violent crime by race beginning in 2008, the first year of Obama’s presidency.  At any rate, the incredible statement by the Wapo author, that there is no history of black on white violence, is just pure dark fantasy.

Heat Street has a rollup of some of the more ugly prog tweets in response to this incident.  I will leave you to read them all.  I’ll only address two:

“white people cannot suffer racism, it’s an actual impossibility if you understand WTF racism is”

This is a deeply disingenuous claim, one that allows progressive to engage in the most vile racism against whites while claiming the moral high ground.  It is disgusting.

As defined by Dictionary.com:  “Racism is a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.”  It is a color blind definition.  The race hustlers claim that blacks as a race cannot discriminate against whites because whites are the dominant power in the country.  What they really mean is that blacks get a pass for their anti-white racism because of “power.”  But the reality is that when one person discriminates against another on the basis of race, they are exercising superior power at that discrete time and place, whether that be torturing someone because they are white, refusing to allow whites into a meeting, etc.  Racism is racism, period.

“White people suddenly calling for hate crimes charges. Oh this is rich after years of fighting the very idea of a ‘hate crime,’”

Demanding equal treatment under the law is now apparently a conservative value.  She is right though, that many on the right have derided claiming the enactment of “hate crime” as a law.  This is a progressive gambit, that an act of violence is somehow more demanding of punishment because it is done out of racism.  Murder is murder.  Assault is assault.  That said, if the hate crime laws begin to get imposed equally under the law, that means much more incarceration for blacks.  I for one don’t think that warranted, whether imposed on blacks or whites.  No one should be criminally punished for their thoughts, only their actions.  That said, the Saul Alinsky in me recognizes that this needs to be shoved down the race hustlers’ throats until they are calling the “hate crime” laws racist.

Obviously, one can tell from the above that we have a real problem with race relations in this country today.  Yet in a recent interview with ABC News, after appropriately condemning the Chicago torture as a “hate crime,” Obama claimed with a straight face that “race relations have gotten better” in this country under his watch.  That may well be the most shameless lie he has ever told.

Obama has been the most racially divisive President in decades, if not all the way back to the first prog Dem to occupy the White House, the deeply racist Woodrow Wilson.  This from a CBS article on a poll they conducted in April, 2015:

. . . Americans’ views on race relations in the U.S. have grown significantly more pessimistic. Sixty-one percent now say race relations are generally bad, up 23 points from earlier this year. It is the first time a majority has held this view since the 1990s. Just a third of Americans now say race relations are good. These opinions are the most negative this poll has found since 1992, . . .

This is almost a complete reversal from the poll taken during Obama’s first year in office.  Then, 66% of Americans, myself included, felt that race relations were good.  That was before Obama poisoned the well and opened the progressive Pandora’s Box of hatred.  To put it in a nutshell, Obama should get a lifetime achievement award from the KKK.

I’ll try to list most of his destructive acts or omissions regarding race that come to mind.  Feel free to add any not here into the comments:

– Obama has added racial preferences into virtually every law amenable to such.  The worst of these was Dodd-Frank, strengthening the horrendous race based laws that led to our economic collapse in 2007.

–  Obama has never once tried to reign in increasing black militancy, irrespective of the degree to which it was based on falsehoods.  For instance, the Black Lives Matter group has been incredibly caustic and is directly responsible both for the rise in attacks on police and the rise of violent crime in major cities.  The movement was founded on falsehoods of police unfairly targeting and killing innocent blacks.  And yet, in October, 2015, Obama publicly defended the movement, calling their issues “legitimate,” and citing to his own brushes with “biased policing.”

– Obama has sat silent throughout major BLM led riots in Missouri and Maryland.  And when he has weighed in on situations where race has been an issue, he has all but endorsed the rioting or thrown in his lot with the race hustlers.  Who can forget Obama’s claim that, if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin, the black teen killed by a “white Hispanic” in an act of justifiable self defense in Florida.  Or who can forget him saying the police acted “stupidly” when, in fact, they had followed procedure in asking the race hustling Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates to step out of his house.

– The single most important thing that America could do for blacks, particularly those poor and in the inner cities, is drastically improve education for their children.  Both Thomas Sowell and Juan Williams have referred to this as the major civil rights issue of our generation.  Yet Obama has fought any school reform that would take a penny from Teachers’ Unions tooth and nail.  His two most notorious efforts were to kill a successful school choice program in Louisiana that primarily served poor blacks, and near his first act in office, killing the DC voucher program that allowed underprivileged blacks to attend the same private schools as Obama’s own children.

– Obama has never addressed, to my knowledge, any of the major problems of the bottom economic half of black society in America.  It begins with black children born to single mothers in 73% of all black pregnancies.  He has never addressed the criminality in that part of society, nor has he ever addressed the importance of education.

– Obama has presided over the opening of Pandora’s progressive box.  Everywhere in academia, people are taught that every straight white non prog male is evil and motivated by racism.  Political correctness is run amok everywhere as the progs seek to use thought control to establish their beliefs and attack anyone who challenges them.  Racism no longer depends on objective acts by a racist individual.  Under micro-aggression theory, racism exists if a black subjectively believes it is so.

– No group of people have fared less well economically than blacks under the Obama administration.

– The worst possible thing that Obama could do for blacks is to relieve those black children who have gone feral from any fear of discipline in schools.  Yet that is Obama’s latest push.  City Journal has a long and horrendous article documenting this insanity:

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

. . . .

Over the last year, a Seattle school district in the throes of “restorative justice” experienced an alleged gang rape and several student deaths.  Criminal charges, including murder, were filed against a group of students not yet out of middle school, reports the Seattle Times. Teachers’ unions in Fresno, Des Moines, New York City, and Indianapolis have all lodged complaints about the anti-discipline philosophy, according to Education Week. The Fresno teachers signed a petition pointing out that students are returned to class after cursing at teachers and physically assaulting them, without suffering any consequences. Fresno’s teachers have been injured trying to stop fights; some are retiring because teaching where severely disruptive students cannot be dislodged has become impossible. In Des Moines, students now hit and scream at each other and their teachers, reports the Des Moines Register. . . .

Bottom line, there need to be single standards for all Americans.  In every case where dual standards are applied today, it is in furtherance of the progressive canards that white racism is pervasive in society today and victimized blacks must be protected from it.

Piers Morgan, who has turned out to be one of the more articulate observers of our President,  After listening to Obama’s claim to have improved race relations, Mr. Morgan had this to say:

“Spare me the self-congratulatory claptrap, Mr President.

You’ve done absolutely nothing to stem America’s appalling culture of gun violence that claims 32,000 lives a year.

Even more damningly, for the country’s first black president, you’ve done nothing to reduce racial divisions.

In fact, those divisions are getting wider and worse, not better.”

As to the “culture of gun violence,” the answer to that is not gun control, it is addressing the violent and deep dysfunction in the lower economic half of the black community.  As to the racial divisions, he is spot on.