"The conservative smear that President Obama, as State Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois), supported a Stand Your Ground law has made the species jump into the mainstream media with an assist from MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, the ostensible counterweight to conservative Morning Joe host Joe
Scarborough. On Tuesday morning, Brzezinski credulously read a Wall Street Journal piece that tried to paint the President’s Friday remarks about Stand Your Ground as a reversal, and as usual, there was no one around to call bullsh*t.
Noting that this is “pretty important, given the grand scheme of the conversation,” Brzezinski dutifully read from the WSJ piece, which uses weasel words and sleight of hand to conclude that then-State Senator Obama “participated” in an “examination” of Illinois’ self-defense law. and “emerged as a Stand Your Ground proponent.”
Brzezinski also parroted another sick conservative talking point, that “minorities, in some ways, have been on the benefiting side of Stand Your Ground” in Florida..
Anyway, you would think that after a black teenager was shot to death in Florida for just....well, being a young black teenager; it would be black folks worrying about their safety and warning their children to be careful of white folks. Not so much. Apparently this is a good time in America for white folks to warn each other of the dangers of living with black people. I guess this is why the prison industrial complex continues to grow and black men are being locked away in record numbers.
"In The National Review on Tuesday, Hanson notes that Attorney General Eric Holder told the NAACP that George Zimmerman's acquittal meant he had to give his son "The Talk," about how black people are assumed to be violent by some white people and thus at great risk for harm. Hanson says, "Yet I fear that for every lecture of the sort that Holder is forced to give his son, millions of non-African-Americans are offering their own versions of ensuring safety to their progeny." Hanson does not try to be funny, the way Derbyshire did, and he doesn't make the same kind of vague warnings about a simmering race war. (Derbyshire said about 5 percent of blacks were "ferociously hostile to whites," and another 50 percent or so of them would go along out of solidarity and becaue they think white people have it coming.) But his basic idea is the same: watch out for black kids.
Hanson says his father — a Democrat! — told him once, "When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you." Hanson continues:
Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young — or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son.
When he was a grad student, Hanson says, two black guys tried to break into his apartment while he was in it. Another time, four black guys tried to steal his bike while he was on it. "Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children," he says.
This is dumb and not very polite, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, but also does not actually make Hanson's kids safe.
If I were to tell you that I only employ Asian-Americans to do my taxes because "Asian-Americans do better on the Math SAT," you would not simply question my sensitivity, but my mental faculties. That is because you would understand that in making an individual decision, employing an ancestral class of millions is not very intelligent. Moreover, were I to tell you I wanted my son to marry a Jewish woman because "Jews are really successful," you would understand that statement for the stupidity which it is.But racism makes people do dumb things, Coates writes.." [Source]
Indeed it does.
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