The Problem With Racializing Events

America's National Media Plays Along....With the BIG LIE

Some events very much ARE racial/ethnic in nature, but many others are not, but it’s easy to racialize even non-racial events because race/ethnicity is easy to see, while ideology isn’t.

For instance, the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement grew out of, what appears to be a wrongheaded, view that police shoot and kill more black people than members of any other ethnic group.

That turns out to be false.

It turns out that despite the widely held view that black Americans are systemically targeted by the police, analysis shows that more white people die at the hands of law enforcement officers than any other race.

Peter Moskos, an assistant professor at New York City University’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has concluded that during the period ranging from May 2013 to April of 2015 roughly 49% of those killed by LEOs were white, while only 30% were black.

The stats are even more glaring when such deaths are adjusted for the homicide rates. Then data shows that whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the hands of police,” Moskos said.

Moskos added, “Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.” (http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/us/study-more-whites-killed-by-police-than-blacks)

It’s easy to see why the radicalized BLM movement would be seen as representing black America, even though they clearly do not.  The faces of that movement are indeed black, the areas in which they organize are predominantly black and all of us, in school are taught to generalize from the local to the global, from the specific to the more general, predisposing us to such generalizations socially, as well.

While it turns out that the BLM movement very much DOES represent a specific sub-set of African-Americans, it is also a sub-set that has been grossly overlooked by Americans who’ve too often subsumed them into the larger black community, which is highly unfortunate, because it gives such radicalized groups the perceived cover of representing larger “group grievances,” when they, in fact, DO NOT.

It’s similar to the mistaken way we view serial killers. When most people think of serial killers they reflexively think of the likes of John Wayne Gacey, Ted Bundy, the “BTK killer” (Dennis Rader), Ed Gien, the “Green River Killer” (Gary Ridgway), Jeffrey Dahmer, etc.

What do ALL those serial killers have in common?

They’re all white.

It turns out that the list of black serial killers is also very long. Including the likes of Matthew Emanuel Macon (Murdered and Raped 5 White Women in Lansing), Shelly Brooks (Murdered 7 prostitutes in Detroit Cass Corridor), Brian Ranard Davis (6 women known murdered), Paul Durousseau (Seven women), Mark Goudeau “The Baseline Killer” (Eight women and a man in 2005-2006), Coral Eugene Watts (11 women in Texas & 1 in Michigan)among many others.

In other words, many of our initial suppositions about the racialization of things is wrong.

The reason that’s important is that it takes away the focus on those dysfunctional people in every group and, by blaming an entire ethnic group, regular, average people from such groups are put on the defensive, which gives even further cover to the dysfunctional among us all.

That FYF911 or FukYoFlag group down in Texas is, without question, a vile hate group that has to be dealt with. From its verbiage and the most recent result, it’s very similar to the Zebra Killers in California a few decades ago. The Zebra Killings were made much harder to solve because of the false perception that that group (1) didn’t actually exist (an initial mistaken view), (2) the media’s fears that focusing on the obvious racial element in that group might inflame anti-black bigotry overall...again, subsuming a fringe, radicalized group into the larger whole. A graphic history of the Zebra Killings can be found (http://www.heretical.com/miscella/zebra.html).

Ironically enough, racializing, or generalizing smaller subsets as representing the larger group makes it harder to discern the actual truth and more difficult to bring the violently dysfunctional to justice.

Let’s hope that we can learn from the past and NOT give Ms. “Sunshine” and her FYF911 group the latitude that the Zebra Killers got back in the 1970s. While FYF911 IS very much a “black group,” it very much DOES NOT represent much of black America.