Friday, August 23, 2013

A dangerous and false narrative

The murder of Christopher Lane in the small American town of Duncan has been big news in Australia.

Christopher Lane was a local boy from Melbourne who some of my students had met. He was gunned down by three bored teenagers while he was out jogging. The boy accused of pulling the trigger is reported to have danced happily while being charged with his murder.

There is a narrative amongst left-liberals in which white people enact racial violence against people of colour as part of a systemic racism. This narrative means that cases like Trayvon Martin get tremendous publicity. Trayvon Martin was a young black man who was challenged by a part white, part Hispanic neighbourhood watch volunteer called George Zimmerman. What happened next is disputed but Zimmerman claims that he was attacked by Martin and when his head was being banged against the pavement he shot Martin in self-defence. Zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering Martin.

For those who follow the "whites as enactors of racial violence" narrative, this was seen as another case in which whites were able to perpetrate violence against black Americans with the connivance of a racist system. Even President Obama joined in by choosing to identify with Martin with the words: "If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon."

But the narrative is both wrong and dangerous. It is wrong because most violence against young black men is committed by other young black men and because there is a much higher incidence of black against white violence than the other way round.

The narrative is dangerous because it encourages a resentment against whites by other races which can then lead to crimes against white people.

It is possible that the shooting of Christopher Lane was motivated in part by racial resentment stoked by the narrative. The teenage boy accused of pulling the trigger, James Edwards, is African American. He sent the following tweets earlier this year:
A couple of Tweets also suggest that Edwards wasn’t fond of white people.

On April 29, he tweeted, “90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM.”

On July 15, days after the George Zimmerman verdict, Edwards tweeted “Ayeee I knocced out 5 woods since Zimmerman court!:) #ayeeee.”

“Woods” is a derogatory term for white people.

He claims to have knocked out 5 white people in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict. Even if that is not true, it shows the influence of the narrative in his mind and how it was used to justify violence against whites.

There is a good article by James McWhorter, who is himself African American, regarding this issue. It's a thoughtful and well-balanced article on the issue of black crime in America.

15 comments:

  1. The Americans really have their own issues with race, going back a very long time, that can be difficult for non-Americans to identify with.

    That doesn't mean there are no race issues elsewhere, but the Americans have a unique way of thinking about it.

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  2. Here's my take:

    The Lane case, like the Trayvon case, clearly exposes one major rift in the Raciss Manifesto:

    America is now so thoroughly racially mixed that it's darned near impossible to even figure out the various races of the actors and to convincingly paint any of them as truly "raciss".

    Zimmerman was white, no Hispanic, no white... something something. From a thoroughly interracial family.

    In this case, one of the black boys has a white mother and a deceased white stepfather. The driver was white. And so on.

    This is all just a distraction from the way The Powers That Be (an interracial group full of shameless, pretend-racists) is looting the country and taxing/debting all of us to death, while turning the youngest generation into a band of wild degenerates that they occasionally whip up into a frenzy with another Evil White Man lecture.

    The only thing worse than this racist propaganda and manipulation, and the senseless violence it engenders, is that it comes from people who don't even believe a word of it themselves.

    They're doing the same crap over in Europe. They herd the unemployed, unsexed, frustrated brown boys into mosques and tell them that all of their problems are the fault of the native devils and their whores, and then unleash them on the native population. And the governments just look on, in silent approval, only persecuting the natives who dare complain about being beaten and raped. This is all part of the plan.

    And, yes, I'm getting angry. At this point, the fact that this is being done systematically is impossible to overlook.

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  3. The mixed race and indeterminate ancestry of most Americans makes racial categorisation of most American whites difficult. Many of the whites are of mixed European and Hispanic, Asian, Arab or African descent which means that they are not actually part of the European races which are by definition of pure white lineage and defined by specific ethnicities tied to geographical locations. This leads to a confusion of identity and accordingly impaired psychological development with a sense of alienation and resentment which is difficult to ameliorate.

    Added to this unstable mix is the presence of a large and growing Third World immigrant population who are also alienated and often living on the margins of society.The freedom of racial mixing in America makes these violent confrontations inevitable as these psychological instabilities and resentments clash.

    It seems likely that the recurrent violence will continue and increase as the racial stock of the nation declines. The imposition of an apartheid system may be the only way in which the races can be officially segregated and each group live in relative peace and harmony apart.

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  4. Nah.

    Race is quite clear and continues to be pretty important.

    And even in countries like Brazil, race matters.

    Because, racial characteristics.... matter.


    FTWR..............

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  5. The murderer is a pretty good example of the black effeminate and psychotic male.
    Something not picked up on by most people but young black men have a very feminine manner about them in a way that seems to be the product of their upbringing in single mother homes.
    They wear jewelery, obsess about shoes and have emotional outbursts like a girl.
    As can be seen in the murderers slightly homosexual and effeminate selfies of himself. A habit of very vain girls.

    Unlike other commentators I think the issue is a racial hate one. He hated white people because he was a "racist" in the most rational use of the word.
    On top of that though blacks inferiority complex and effeminate upbringing means they lash out emotionally to prove they are masculine.
    Which is often by being criminal.

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  6. "And even in countries like Brazil, race matters."

    Yes but Brazil does not have a significant middle class. It has a white wealthy elite who are largely Portuguese, German and Italian and a huge mass of impoverished mixed race people made up of blacks, mulattoes and mestizos and race mixed whites. It seems that the USA and much of the anglosphere is heading the way of Brazil. The only significant difference, however, is that the Brazilian elites take their ethnicity and heritage seriously whereas many of the American ones do not.

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  7. "Race is quite clear and continues to be pretty important."

    Less race than simple colorism, like in Brazil. The "one drop rule" is sort of falling by the wayside as everyone becomes mobile/anonymous and just falls back on appearance.

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  8. People like Zimmerman and me have been effectively kicked out of the colored club. It wasn't like that when I was a child. Things have changed.

    Also, the economic classes are separating more, and color is becoming a proxy for class. It's definitely more Brazilian, altogether.

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  9. "Unlike other commentators I think the issue is a racial hate one."

    I don't anyone was disputing that.

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  10. I don't think anyone was disputing that, I mean. My point was that TPTB are egging this sort of thing on because they have a political advantage in the serfs cannibalizing each other.

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  11. I believe Zimmerman was also 1/16th African. Even that wasn't enough to protect him (along with being an anti-racist).

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  12. Yes, he's part African on the Peruvian side. Nobody cares anymore. Looks white enough to be an Evil White Man. If they don't expand the definition of "white" to encompass more people, then it's hard to keep up the oppression narrative because there aren't actually that many 100% European people in the youngest generation. They make up fewer and fewer of the people at the socio-economic top of the ladder, although still a majority.

    They're having to shuffle the cards to keep the game going, sort of the way the feminist "anti-sexism" movement is running out of steam now that men are doing so poorly as a group. Victims of their own success. LOL

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  13. He's 1/8th or so black, same as the head of the NAACP Ben Jealous.

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  14. "Yes, he's part African on the Peruvian side. Nobody cares anymore. Looks white enough to be an Evil White Man."

    Nah. Only the media was running that "white Hispanic" line of bullshit, but nobody believed it. Everyone who saw a picture of him realized he was not even particularly white-looking as Hispanics go.

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