Ferguson Archives - Rogue Columnist

Strange fruit

So this is what post-racial America looks like.

Businesses are burned and looted in a black suburb, not by white supremacists a la Tulsa's Greenwood in 1921 but apparently by some residents a la Watts in 1965, only this time in suburbia.

The spark was a grand jury declining to indict the white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man. Other outrages gained national attention. Among them, New York City police wrestling a black man to the sidewalk and his death following a "chokehold" and a Cleveland officer shooting and killing a 12-year-old black boy with a pellet gun.

All the progressive Web sites and MSNBC programs are unanimous in their verdicts: the police are at war with unarmed black men and black communities. Indeed, the police are dangerous to American society. Traffic and ratings increase with the coverage — the visuals are great, as are hashtags such as #HandsUpDon'tShoot and #ICan'tBreathe.

Protests against "police violence" repeatedly disrupt the downtowns of progressive cities. Again, great visuals. They are largely peaceful, so far. The grievance is that this injustice is obvious and intolerable.

Meanwhile, progressives are dealt their most devastating electoral defeat since the 1920s. From the U.S. Congress to most statehouses, political control is even more in the hands of those who see none of the above as serious problems.

At the risk of being crass and reductive, many are supporters of a new Jim Crow. What is undeniable is that the new entirely reactionary Republican Party's "platform" was opposition to the nation's first black president. It succeeded largely because of an irrational but instinctive backlash against him in the majority white electorate. The same happened in 2010.

Welcome to post-racial America.

Jon Talton December 15, 201436

Politics: National

Police, race and misconceptions

By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

The recent string of well-publicized police killings of unarmed blacks and the nationwide wave of mass protests by young, multi-ethnic crowds, has once again brought the issue of police and race from the backburner of ethnic-studies classes to the forefront of public debate.

Some incidents triggering the protests are controversial (Ferguson); others, such as the shooting death of a 12-year old boy with a pellet pistol or the death of a sidewalk cigarette salesman from a banned choke-hold appear as unmistakable tragedies to those who have seen the video evidence.

Instead of dissecting these cases on an individual basis, I want to examine the push-back from conservative pundits, whose talking-points and rhetoric mirror police attitudes, including prominent and influential men like Rudy Giuliani, who is widely credited with amazing reductions in crime during his tenure as mayor of New York City, and whose policing models (most notably "broken windows") have been widely emulated.

The rhetoric from law and order conservatives is important because police tactics can best be changed through reforms in police attitudes and in the attitudes of politicians presiding over law enforcement communities. That rhetoric is filled with fictions, half-truths, faulty inferences, and misused statistics. Several prominent talking points deserve scrutiny:

1. "Ninety-three percent of black murder victims in the United States are killed by other blacks" — the "black on black crime" thesis. This comes from a 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report covering the period from 1980 through 2008.

The fly in the ointment is that the report also says 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by other whites. Yet nobody is talking about "white on white crime" as a means of distracting the conversation whenever a white is the victim of police abuse. Do we really believe that murderers politely decline to kill the members of other races, or is this simply a statistical artifact of demographic segregation and concentration?

Jon Talton December 8, 201459

Politics: National

The same-sex marriage moment

What does same-sex marriage mean? This is not a rhetorical question. Nor am I trolling. So stay with me and please provide your thoughts in the comments section.

As I write, a majority of states recognize same-sex marriage and the federal courts keep striking down bans. On a personal level, the meaning is profound. Being able to marry whom you want. To be at his or her side in the hospital and have legal rights of spouses. It is also arguably the biggest civil-rights victory since 1965.

And yet, the same-sex marriage moment is happening as most of the country, geographically at least, is becoming not merely more conservative but rabidly reactionary.

The assault on women's reproductive rights is unlike anything seen since the dark age before the advent of the pill.

Republican governors and legislatures, which control a majority of the states, are engaged in an ongoing effort to suppress the vote.

And the last time I checked, the GOP has a 66 percent chance of taking control of the Senate in November. If so, our halting regress toward national suicide will get a tremendous boost.

Jon Talton October 13, 201467