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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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I don't know if Gates is telling the truth, but if he is, then DeSantis is in the wrong here.

I went through a link chain to figure out who/what Crenshaw was, and I ended up at the Time Magazine article, which does provide some useful context.

"While the Reconstruction era after the Civil War is often skimmed over in high school U.S. history classes, AP African American Studies delves into progress made at that time, as well as how the roots of today’s mass incarceration system can be traced back to that era."

That's where my alarm bells went off. Mass incarceration is critical race theory. It's a conspiracy theory which, depending on which version you hear, states that the reason 13% of the population makes up 52% of the arrests is that either A. they're not actually committing more crime, the police just have it out for them because they're black or B. they are committing more crime, but there's deliberate social conditioning to make them do it (because they're black).

I mean, I'm totally sympathetic to the claim that the existence of prison labor provides incentive to arrest more people and hold them for longer. I'm also sympathetic to the claim that people whose jobs depend on the existence of prison will try to arrest more people and hold them for longer to protect their job security. The part of mass incarceration that always loses me is when people make race a part of it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the reason that America bought slaves from Africa wasn't because they had a pre-existing, innate antipathy towards Africans; it's because Africa was doing the selling. There is no similar reason I can think that would motivate the prison-industrial complex to go after black people, specifically. And every time I've asked a leftist to provide me with a reason, they just say "racism," and I've never found that satisfactory, because the vast majority of racists don't take pleasure in inflicting pain on a particular race for the sake of it, they're just indifferent to it and/or care about it less than they do pain inflicted upon members of their own race. I could argue that white people in power feel less guilty arresting black people than arresting white people, so they target black people to lesson their guilt over the horrors of the prison-industrial complex, but without any supporting evidence, I'm inclined to assume the other explanations for 1350 are more accurate. And even if the hypothesis I just created has truth to it, it doesn't connect to Reconstruction, like the paragraph says.

Sorry if I come across as dismissive in the above paragraph. I want to be more open-minded. f anyone reading this wants to make a case for racial mass incarceration as the result of systemic racism, I'd appreciate it and I promise not to belittle you.

states that the reason 13% of the population makes up 52% of the arrests

27% of all arrests. It's only in the 50% neighborhood for homicide, robbery, and gambling.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-43

Henry Louis Gates is the guy best known for attempting to break into his own house, then throwing a fit when a police officer stopped him, and then hung around for an hour until his identity could be confirmed.

That is what Henry Louis Gates is most famous for among poorly read people. And if you think he is some sort of wokester, you are sadly mistaken.

He has had a tv show for ~ 10 years, which he's surely more famous for than being arrested when his front door jammed.

Also many reasonable positions which support trusting him:

The enemy of individuality is groupthink, Gates says, and here he holds everyone accountable. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies field—especially those campaigning for government reparations for slavery—by insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. "Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that."

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