How common is crime committed by blacks?
Steve QJ, writing below, is a black writer who is generally well-informed. He makes a point below that most conservatives would applaud: That people should be judged as individuals, not as members of some identity group. What he fails to note, however is where the identity group obsession mostly comes from: The political Left. It is the Left who lump people into groups and fail to allow for individual differences.
Sadly, to rebut Leftist generalizations, conservatives often have to talk in the same terms. Leftist thinking is dominant so Leftist generalizations are often accepted and used, if only to rebut them.
Steve himself has to talk in such terms to make his basic point: That blacks make up a large PERCENTAGE of serious crimes but the NUMBER of blacks who commit serious crimes is relatively low. Most blacks do not commit serious crimes.
Incessant media coverage of violent crime creates the impression that it is common. It is in face relatively rare. And that includes crimes committed by blacks
It’s hard to imagine a more polarising cultural moment than the OJ Simpson murder trial.
A beloved black celebrity stands accused of murdering his blonde-haired, blue-eyed wife and her “friend.” A hotshot black lawyer steps up to defend him. A racist detective stands as a key witness in front of a majority black jury. And the whole thing unfolds less than 3 years after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King half to death.
OJ’s trial sat right at the intersection of lingering questions about race, justice, class and fame. By the time the verdict was announced, most of the public seemed to forget that two people had been murdered.
Instead, it became a proxy war between black and white America.
A Los Angeles county poll (which closely reflected sentiments nationwide) found that, despite the evidence, 77% of African American residents agreed with OJ’s not-guilty verdict. Only 28% of white residents felt the same way.
Writing for the New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. quotes Wynton Marsalis, who compared the divide to sports fans arguing about their favourite teams:
You want your side to win, whatever the side is going to be. And the thing is, we’re still at a point in our national history where we look at each other as ‘sides.’
But Dave Chappelle, as he often does, summed it up best in this skit from Chappelle’s Show:
Lawyer: Mr Chappelle, are you suggesting that because one of the detectives is a possible racist, and because there may have been some minor oversights in the investigation, it completely lets OJ off the hook?
Chappelle: EXACTAMUNDO! The defence rests sir.
Lawyer: Mr Chappelle…will you at least admit that OJ more than likely killed his wife?
Chappelle: …sir, my blackness will not permit me to make a statement like that.
Black people are used to being seen as a monolith. At times, it was even useful to see ourselves this way.
Black-owned banks offered loans to black people when no others would do so. Black communities pooled their resources to help each other survive during segregation. Black residents banded together to fight discriminatory practices in their cities.
Black solidarity has served as a refuge from the sense of being an outsider. A support in times of strife and hardship. A defence, as John Dilulio Jr put it, against the fear generated by every young black male not wearing a tie or handcuffs.
So it’s uncomfortable when somebody challenges the instinct to cover for each other, as Barrington Martin II does in this Twitter thread:
I’m gonna go ahead and say it…there is a certain sect of American blacks in our country that do most of the crime and cause most of the crime we see everywhere […] There are types of these people within EVERY race but this specific group is the most problematic (based on statistics).
However, [because] our society is so obsessed with race, especially race relations of the past, this group is cloaked by the entire American black race when they shouldn’t be & they are lumped in with the rest of the American blacks, when they shouldn’t be.
This is a bold statement to make publicly in 2022, but it isn’t a new one.
Chris Rock famously made the same point 26 years ago in his Bring the Pain comedy special:
There’s like a civil war going on with black people. And there’s two sides; there are black people, and there’s ni**as. And ni**as have got to go. […] I love black people, but I hate ni**as.
Tupac made it 28 years ago in this interview for BET:
The main thing for us to remember is that the same crime element that white people are scared of, black people are scared of […] Just ‘cos we black, we get along with the killers or something? We get along with the rapists ‘cos we black and we from the same hood?
The comments beneath Martin’s tweet too, are littered with people who recognise the problem. But if you’ve spent any time following mainstream racial discourse, you’ll notice that hardly anybody dares talk about it. Some claim that even acknowledging the existence of “black crime” is “loaded and controversial”.
But let’s think about this.
If you have spent any time following racial discourse, you’ll have heard that black people, who make up roughly 14% of the U.S. population, commit around 51% of the homicides. In 2019, that equalled a total of 4078 homicides by black people. But even if each of those murders was committed by a different black person (i.e. if there were no repeat offenders), that’s only 0.008% of the 46.8 million African Americans.
As Barrington points out, this tiny minority is being cloaked by all the black people in America. And worse, thanks to decades of stereotypes and TV shows about black criminality, this minority is treated as if it represents black people as a whole. And so, most progressives simply pretend it‘s not happening.
But do you know who can’t pretend it’s not happening? The black people who live in those communities. The parents of the children who are being killed by that 0.008%. The people for whom black lives matter regardless of who pulls the trigger.
But the tragedy is that their voices get lost in the noise. Because we’re still at a point where we look at each other as “sides.”
There’s nothing wrong with community. There’s nothing wrong with “reppin’ for your team.” There’s nothing wrong with solidarity.
But there are no gangsters in my community. There are no murderers on my team. I feel no solidarity with people who kill innocent black men, women and children, regardless of the colour of their skin.
Because there’s no such thing as “black” crime. There’s just crime. And the belief that it’s racist to talk about it only makes sense of you think crime is a “black” problem.
Yes, some black people, through no fault of their own, are practically born into a life of crime. Yes, poverty and disenfranchisement lead people of all “races” toward crime. Yes, some people will use any mention of a black person committing a crime to claim that black people are criminals by nature.
But does that mean we should say that the 99.99% of black people who made better choices, despite facing similar obstacles, just got lucky? Should we say that the actions of a tiny percentage of criminals are a reflection on the millions of decent, law-abiding black people? Should we say that it’s more important to give cover to criminals than to give a voice to the victims of their crimes?
Sorry, my blackness will not permit me to make a statement like that.
https://steveqj.medium.com/the-illusion-of-blackness-e3ddf57cf3e0
*********************************************************Homeland Security’s ‘Equity Action Plan’ Doubles Down on Discrimination
As many federal agencies under the Biden administration have done, the Department of Homeland Security has implemented a so-called Equity Action Plan.
Pursuant to Executive Order 13985—“Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government”—the DHS Equity Action Plan includes a number of provisions that fly in the face of anti-discrimination laws, to say nothing of human decency.
The equity plan agenda serves to discriminate based on skin color, among other things. The sort of discrimination and divisiveness inherent in race-based and other so-called equity-based policies are a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s prohibition of “discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
The Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security is at the helm of making sure this agenda is implemented the way the Biden administration desires.
That office is supposed to counter discrimination, not encourage and incite it. It says it supports “the Department’s mission to secure the nation while preserving individual liberty, fairness, and equality under the law” and that “CRCL builds in civil rights and civil liberties practices into all of the Department’s activities … .”
Its current role and actions say otherwise, and amount to not only a complete dereliction of duty, but the furthering of an agenda in opposition to the civil rights they were intended to protect.
The seven “key program areas” in the Equity Action Plan continue to play out in discriminatory ways.
“Applying for Naturalization” is one of the areas under which DHS has been throwing away already limited resources in favor of “gender markers” projects.
“Gender markers on USCIS forms and secure documents, including the Certificate of Naturalization and the Certificate of Citizenship” to “incorporate the use of inclusive language that respects gender identities, including gender non-conforming and non-binary individuals” is one of the top seven priorities for DHS “equity.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has an 8.5 million case backlog, yet at the expense of those applicants, many of whom have been waiting for years, the agency is using its time and effort to add various gender options to immigration benefits paperwork at the direction of the DHS.
“Bidding on DHS Contracts” is an area in which the department’s plan reveals its habit of giving an unfair leg up only to preferred businesses or organizations.
It unabashedly “[focuses] additional outreach efforts on underserved communities” with an “aim to address the identified barriers by improving awareness of available opportunities and navigating the contracting process in general, particularly for underserved communities … .”
The DHS is openly holding the hands of potential contractors of its choosing and, in its own words, “navigating the contracting process” for them.
The DHS should not be prioritizing particular groups in such a way that elevates them above others and gives them an unfair advantage in bidding processes. True civil rights and civil liberties are about fair and equal treatment, not special treatment for minority groups.
“Countering all forms of terrorism and targeted violence” is one of the seven areas in which the DHS does not simply elevate certain groups unfairly, but targets groups negatively in a disproportionate way.
It states in the plan that “[domestic violent extremists] are motivated by various factors, including racial bias, perceived government overreach, conspiracy theories promoting violence, and false narratives about unsubstantiated fraud in the 2020 presidential election.”
“Among DVEs, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, including white supremacists … will likely remain the most lethal DVE movement in the Homeland,” it says.
This hyperfocus on white supremacy is nothing new. President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, among others, continually say that domestic violent extremism, and specifically white supremacy, is the “most lethal terrorist threat” to the homeland, despite the evidence showing otherwise.
We know federal agencies have no problem identifying various innocent, patriotic sayings and symbols as indicators of “violent extremism.”
The DHS is clearly targeting those it labels as “white supremacist threats” and ignoring the most obvious, disastrous threats to the homeland, such as the open-border crisis.
Despite being intentionally out of touch with reality, the DHS has no problem touting its equity plan. In fact, the department is proud of it.
It tracks “DHS Equity Accomplishments,” has a DHS Equity Task Force, and holds public feedback and stakeholder engagement listening sessions, during which it prides itself on the “progress” it has made and excitedly brags about how much more it plans to do to drive stakes of division deeper into our institutions.
The left doesn’t care about equity when it comes to the nation’s capital blocking 40% of black children from attending school over their failure to get the COVID-19 vaccine, or when biological women’s rights are infringed by transgender “women” because those civil rights complaints and violations don’t fit its narrative.
But just as it did with the since-abandoned Disinformation Governance Board, the Biden administration has no problem politicizing federal agencies and task forces to achieve radical political outcomes and to further divisive, strong-arm policies.
The Biden administration must end its divisive, damaging, and discriminatory “equity” agenda.
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China hysteria
Could I be the model communist shill? Consider these facts: I was born and raised in China. I speak and read Chinese. Some question my English accent, almost suspiciously posh given that I didn’t speak a word of the language until the age of ten. Before the pandemic, I visited China regularly. My podcast, Chinese Whispers, often explains the Chinese government’s way of looking at things. I studied at Oxford and now work at the heart of the British establishment. Am I not ideally placed to advance Beijing’s agenda?
When I started my career, this was all a joke. Now it’s less of one. The atmosphere in Britain towards China has soured. Over the past seven years, the government has gone from David Cameron’s kowtowing to Beijing to Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss jostling to out-hawk each other. Some of our political class are now applying a new test: will you condemn China at every turn? If not, you’re probably an apologist. There seem to be only two categories: hawk or shill, with no shade in between. The S-word is thrown around with alarming frequency. It doesn’t matter whether you’re actually working for the Chinese Communist party; the point is, you may as well be. As Oxford’s Rana Mitter, perhaps Britain’s foremost academic expert on China, puts it: ‘We’ve gone from complacency to panic without the intervening stage of knowledge.’
I don’t deny that China poses a real challenge. In fact, on this I’m probably aligned with Steve Bannon, who said that the West should be more concerned about Beijing than Moscow. The CCP does plant shills. MI5 is right to warn about politicians taking dirty money from individuals linked to the United Front, which works to capture foreign elites and overseas Chinese. We also need to be clear-eyed about the lobbying efforts from major Chinese companies such as Huawei and question the role played by CCP-funded organisations such as Confucius Institutes.
But that makes it even more important to understand China properly, which is different from empathising or excusing. We need to know the answer to questions such as: how does the Chinese government work? Who are the major influencers within the CCP? What do the Chinese really think? Yet some of us trying to answer those questions – rather than just campaigning against the CCP’s evils – fail the ideological purity test.
Take the Great Britain China Centre, an arm’s-length body of the Foreign Office founded in 1974 which supports liberal minds in China to push through legal reform. It has also been crucial in helping British politicians and civil servants learn about China. It regularly hosts experts to explain, for instance, what Beijing is doing in Xinjiang or how Chinese propaganda works. Officials from the Chinese government are sometimes guests, offering rare opportunities for our politicians to speak to – and challenge – their elusive CCP counterparts.
But as was revealed in June by The Spectator’s Steerpike columnist, the Great Britain China Centre may have to close, because Liz Truss has refused to renew its funding in one of her final acts as Foreign Secretary. The official reason given is ‘budget cuts’. It’s true that it never quite made sense to finance this Belgravia thinktank from the overseas aid budget, but it was only asking for £500,000 and some other pot of money could have been found. Those close to Truss tell me the real reason is that she sees it as a ‘China shill organisation’. It is too cosy with Beijing, says Team Truss, pointing to the meetings with CCP officials as evidence.
Here again is the insidious S-word. Calling someone a ‘shill’ means you don’t need to engage with their arguments. No matter that the centre has always been funded and directed by the Foreign Office (as well as other governments in the Five Eyes group, and corporate sponsors such as HSBC). Or that its director, Merethe Borge MacLeod, spent a decade in Beijing running a Swedish NGO specialising in human rights. She left at a time when foreign charities were increasingly targeted by Xi Jinping’s regime. She is more capable than most of pointing out China’s transgressions.
Anyone who writes about China is used to a little name-calling. I don’t usually mind it. I think it good banter to joke with people I know about how I’ve just received the day’s orders from the embassy. They don’t really think I’m a spy – or at least, I don’t think they do. But it’s no longer funny when real China experts are pushed out and their impartiality questioned just because what they say doesn’t fit a certain worldview.
In the Cold War, Whitehall was filled with spies and Russia experts. It was recognised that it was important for Britain to understand the USSR. People such as Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn were taught Russian during their military service. ‘Know thy enemy’ is surely one of the fundamental maxims of international relations, yet at this critical moment, Britain simply doesn’t understand China.
Last year, The Spectator revealed that there are just 41 diplomats in the Foreign Office who speak fluent Mandarin. A recent study found that, in the UK, there are only 300 graduates of Chinese language each year, a number that hasn’t risen since 1999. Who would train in China Studies if there were no jobs at the other end of it? If China is Britain’s number one threat, as Sunak puts it, then we should be doubling, even tripling the funding for organisations like the Great Britain China Centre. Even Tom Tugendhat, who has been sanctioned by the CCP, has written to the FCDO to protest the centre’s closure.
John Gerson, who was Margaret Thatcher’s adviser on China, told me his theory of the ‘Tiger Woods trap’: ‘When you fall asleep at the wheel and wake up to find traffic coming head-on, a massive overcorrection will land you into the nearest tree.’ Gerson doesn’t think Westminster is there yet, but I’m afraid I see some serious swerving. I just hope there’s still time to steer back.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/id-be-the-perfect-communist-shill/
***********************************************UK: Jacob Rees-Mogg axes more than 250 ‘woke’ Civil Service training courses
Jacob Rees-Mogg has ordered more than 250 “woke” training courses to be scrapped after launching a crackdown on Civil Service “indoctrination”.
The Cabinet Office minister has axed 60 per cent of the wellness, inclusion and diversity courses available to civil servants in his department, and has written to other ministers urging them to do the same.
The courses scrapped include motivational sessions entitled “Find Your Mojo”, “Give Me Strength” and “Buddy to Boss”. They also include courses Mr Rees-Mogg claimed were “indoctrinating” civil servants with “divisive ideological agendas” such as instruction in micro-aggressions and micro-behaviours.
A course delivered by the Behavioural Insights Team – also known as the Nudge Unit – entitled “De-biasing Decision-making” has also been scrapped.
An online description says it “enables participants to use behavioural insights to counter cognitive biases in government and make better calibrated decisions and judgments, ultimately resulting in better project planning, delivery and policy outcomes”.
But Mr Rees-Mogg dismissed the courses as a waste of taxpayers’ money and civil servants’ time, telling The Telegraph: “We cannot make taxpayers pay for civil servants to take courses with names like ‘Find Your Mojo’, ‘Buddy to Boss’ or ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’.
“Courses like this are being scrapped so that civil servants can develop genuinely useful skills instead of being indoctrinated in the divisive ideological agendas that have permeated some of these courses.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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