All Wee-Wee'd up over having been born Black!
Posted on 08/24/2009 9:51:55 AM PDT by IbJensen
After the Obama-Gates-Crowley "beer summit" at the White House ended, Ronald Walter, a black longtime professor of politics at the University of Maryland, said: "Black parents are using this as a case in point of what they have been saying all along" to their children, "Racism hasn't gone away." Children, and especially black males, "are likely to confront it" from police. (Washington Post, July 30).
And on CNN, Colin Powell chimed in with his advice to black children: "When you're faced with an officer who is trying to do his job and get to the bottom of something, this is not the time to get in an argument with him. I was taught that as a child."
Moreover, when President Obama insisted that the situation surrounding the arrest of the Harvard professor was a "teachable moment," former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said: "He's actually right. It is teachable." And Giuliani, customarily brusque, told people, including professor Gates, across the land: "Here's the lesson ... shut up when a cop is asking you questions!" (Fox News, July 31).
Clearly, Mr. Giuliani remains unteachable on this subject. As I reported during his dramatic mayoral career, none of his predecessors since 1958 (when I began covering City Hall) had so alienated black New Yorkers by urging his police to engage in large-scale stop-and-frisks of predominately black residents without charging them with a crime. For a time, he also refused to meet with black leaders.
As for blacks' encounters with police nationally, in 1995, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (before he became a household name) wrote in the Oct. 23 New Yorker magazine: "It's a commonplace that white folks trust the police and black folks don't. Whites recognize this in the abstract, but they're continually surprised at the depth of black wariness. They shouldn't be."
Apparently, Cambridge, Mass., police sergeant James Crowley missed that issue of The New Yorker.
In the same article, Gates added that "blacks - in particular black men - swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories." Almost as soon I got to know and hang out with black jazz musicians decades ago, I heard a lot of those war stories.
I hope, but am skeptical, that a lasting result of Gates' manacling will be the gradual decline in the number of these war stories. In all the continued coverage across the nation of the Gates bust, the one story that gave some substance to my hope appeared in the July 26 issue of the Long Island newspaper, Newsday: "Nassau, Suffolk cite training against racial profiling."
Reporters Zachary Dowdy and Rocco Parascandola told of how the "Nassau and Suffolk police departments said they aggressively work to avoid racial profiling through a medley of training programs and updates for officers."
In Nassau, along with 30 hours of training on cultural diversity in the police academy, a much more enduring practice is "data collection program that requires officers to note the race and ethnicity of motorists they stop on the road."
Detective Lt. Kevin Smith adds that this data is periodically studied to determine if the police department engages in racial profiling.
Furthermore - and I hope other police departments will take notice - Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy told Newsday: "Last year, for the first time, we completed a pilot program where we collected statistics to help identify a baseline for traffic stops and to red-flag officers who differed significantly from peers when making these stops."
What then? "We shared," said Levy, "these data with individuals who were above the norm, sought an explanation, and then possibly referred those individuals for additional training."
This postgraduate education for police officers, if extended nationally and to police on the streets as well, could eventually lead to fewer war stories among black males about the humiliation, and worse, of "Driving While Black."
Surprisingly sound advice coming from Rudy.
The black parents who say this to their children KEEP racism alive by abusing their children verbally. They tell them that no white man will ever like them or see them as an individual or a black person.
Interesting, considering it was WHITE PEOPLE who put Oblama in the White House.
data collection program that requires officers to note the race and ethnicity of motorists they stop on the road.”
So...They are requiring police to profile?
Those of us who want to see racism on its way out need to realize that others benefit greatly from crying racism. They benefit politically, financially, and socially.
Obama has been allied with such people for decades.
Anyone who can believe that Obama did not understand what the racist rants of Jeremiah Wright meant can believe anything.
Thomas Sowell —
All Wee-Wee'd up over having been born Black!
Wow... just... wow. So is it their policy to have LEOs specifically ignore black motorists and focus on white ones to prevent getting red flagged? What the Hell is going on in this country?
There are few things more difficult to overcome than a person who thinks he is a victim - and doesn’t mind boasting about it.
That angle is used as a cultural hammer by those who think it is their duty to perpetuate their home grown righteousness.
That kind of thinking is contrary to leading a good and decent life.
It’s bull durham.
That’s only because they were afraid of being called a racist if they didn’t.
I voted for Alan Keyes in the primary. I didn’t have that worry.
The dirty secret is that Socialists see nothing wrong with Socialism despite a hundred years’ worth of examples. They believe conservativism as practiced under our Constitutional system to be “wrong”.
Uh, forgot the “Barf Alert” for this one.
I hope they really are not saying stupid stuff about the police - they are just setting their children up for failure later in life.
Grow up and move along ...
All great change in America begins at the dinner table. - Ronald Reagan
Of course not, that would just be common sense and smart policing.
That guy looks whiter than me!
Why don’t we just re segregate? Really. Blacks are never going to think anything other than we are racists no matter what we do. I am finished. I have never treated a person of any color any different than any one else. This is bull and I just as soon let them go back to being their own community and let me be in mine if that is how they want it.
As a white child, I too, was taught this Mr. Powell. Any idiot who ever has watched "Cops" on TV also knows this to be true. It's called respect for the law.
Sage advice to "black" children which could have been given in a non-racial context.
Only problem is that, like our President, you feel that any and every injustice that life has imposed on you is racially motivated.
As a white adult, whenever I have faced life's injustices, I haven't had the luxury of slamming the race card on the table.
I have been posting that in discussions like this for years...partly because it is hilarious, and partly because it is dead-on true in many respects.
I am no fan of Chris Rock, but if you take out the advice about driving with a white friend, there isn’t much to argue about. (I would leave the “Don’t drive with a Mad Woman” in there...if you listen closely, she appears to shout “HE GOT WEED! HE GOT WEED! HE GOT IT UP HIS A$$!”)
Contrary to the myth we were fed for decades.
Middle class blacks are more liberal than poor ones.
Money didn’t fix squat. Education probably hurt...it does everyone now.
(ok...a few exceptions like maybe 2-3%)
That is the case if you are black, white or any shade in between. If you have a problem with "da man" wait until the immediate incident is past, and then take it to the next level. Never get into a one-on-one with someone who has more authority than you have at that moment. Senator Foghorn doesn't have more authority than the newby patrolman when Senator F has been stopped for an infraction, real or imagined.
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