October 5: This post is closed, but if you’ve got more to say, here’s the latest post.
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Update: I decided to put blogger links up top where you’re sure to see them: Technorati, Protein Wisdom, Generation Why, B Relevant, Civil Commotion, Sister Toldjah, Scipio the Metalcon, PEER Review, One Voice Now, JivinJehoshaphat, Independent Conservative, The Colossus of Rhodey, Baldilocks, The Defiance, Colorado Democrat, Hyscience…
Black Genocide is an informative site. Check it out.
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People have nothing better to do than blow the most mundane things out of proportion. This post is not so much a defense of Bill Bennett (because he has nothing to defend) as it is a response to people who keep e-mailing to ask if I’m going to respond to Bennett’s remarks.
Last Wednesday on his radio show, this is what Bennett said in response to a caller’s comment about abortion and crime:
But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, you know, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
In typical fashion, black politicians and other hustlers are calling for Bennett’s head on a platter. In the backrooms, out of sight, white liberals are jumping for joy. If they can’t sell their ideas enough to win elections, they’ll keep floating the conservatives-are-racists meme because they know exactly how blacks will react.
First of all, I am embarrassed that blacks react in such predictable ways whenever a white conservative utters anything remotely related to skin color. All pretense of reason flies right out the window, blown about like a feather caught up in the wind. White liberals thrive on it, my friends.
Part of what makes Democrats liberal is that their agenda, devoid of real ideas and solutions, is based on race. In order to win elections, they must pit the races against each other. Constant racial and class warfare is what they wage, nothing more. For the love of God, I am asking blacks to think, use their minds and stop reacting with infantile emotion.
You’ve allowed the media to fan you into a feeding frenzy. The white men you vote for every election don’t give a rat’s behind about you or your black babies, so why, for crying out loud, do you allow yourselves to be manipulated and played like screechy violins by a bunch of snot-nosed, empty-headed goofs in left-leaning newsrooms?
Frankly, it makes black people look like insolent children. It magnifies either a reluctance or inability to think beyond the sound bite. If white Democrats are raging over it, it must be a big deal, right? The anti-intellectual streak in too many parts of the black community is absolutely abhorrent.
Why do black Americans, people who live in the greatest country in the world where they have the kind of freedom that blacks in other countries can only fantasize about, believe they’re the most put-upon and oppressed race in the history of the world? Get in line! Many cultures have done much worse to all kind of people, including people of their own race.
Second, black liberals have been voting for people who openly advocate abortion for the past 30 years! Child killing is morally reprehensible, as Bill Bennett said, but for some strange reason, it doesn’t bother black folks when it’s time to go to the polls. A full 90 percent continue voting for whites who advocate the death of black babies. They consort with white women whose life mission is child killing via Planned Parenthood.
The head honcho was the late Margaret Sanger, who was a eugenicist. I wrote about Sanger in Black Women And Child Killing, Irreverent Reverends, Part II, and Pro-Life Achievement Awards Luncheon.
Black women are more than three times as likely than white women to kill their babies in utero. Thirty-six percent of all abortions are performed on black women. Bennett said that is morally reprehensible. But you won’t ever hear the media-addicted Jesse Jackson or the clownish Al Sharpton or the virulent Howard Dean or bigoted John Kerry say that. Your very own NAACP OFFICIALLY advocates the murders of its own people, and over 70 percent of black babies are born to women who didn’t bother to get married and create a stable home for their children, but you’re “outraged” over what some white man said?
A bunch of hysterical hypocrites, the whole lot of you.
Third, Bennett’s hypothetical is based on fact. Blacks are 12.3 percent of the population, and about half are black men, which means black men are approximately 6 percent of the U.S. population. [Note: Until I remember where I got a certain statistic and link to the source, I'm deleting it. Look for an update tomorrow. In the meantime, the stats found at BJS are still alarming.] (see Bureau of Justice Statistics). Why aren’t you outraged over those shameful statistics?
Hypothetically speaking, if fewer black boys were born, there’d be fewer around to commit crimes. Bennett didn’t (and couldn’t if he wanted to!) say that all blacks commit crimes. In the aggregate, however, blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes relative to their numbers in the general population. It follows, statistically speaking, that the fewer blacks there are, the fewer crimes will be committed. This is not a racist statement, people. It is a statistical reality. Blame black criminal thugs for preying on their own people, not Bill Bennett for pointing it out. Illogical!
The problem with the black subculture in general — not each and every individual black person — is that facts have little meaning. Emotions and hair-trigger reactions to anything racial are the norm. And you know what? It sets a bad precedent for our children. They must learn to use their minds, to reason and to think critically about these issues, not throw tantrums because somebody said something they didn’t like.
Bennett’s crime was alluding to black crime rates. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s OK to discuss black grievances and entitlements but taboo to discuss black criminality. James Taranto of the Opinion Journal concurs:
So why do we see this as a sign of political correctness’s decline? Well, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we kept hearing from our liberal friends that what this country needs is an honest discussion of race. Of course, liberals who call for a discussion of race never actually want it to be honest. Rather, they want to engage in the old familiar ritual in which blacks air their grievances, white liberals trumpet their moral superiority, the rest of us shut up and listen, and dissenters are shamed and silenced (see John Conyers’s and Wade Henderson’s demands regarding Bennett, above). (Emphasis added)
If I were Bennett, I wouldn’t apologize for jack.
An economist named Steven Levitt, author of the best-seller Freakonomics, made a similar argument about crime rates and abortion. He said that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s led to a reduction in crime a generation later.
I criticized his theory in Steven Levitt Says Child Killing Reduces Crime, and he responded to the post in comments, as did his main critic, Steve Sailer here and here. The post wasn’t so much a shot against Levitt; I was questioning his implications. I urge you to read it carefully and follow the links in the post. Sailer argues in Pre-emptive Executions?, a must-read, that the numbers show exactly the opposite of Levitt’s theory:
[D]id the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legalization? Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history….Their murder rate was 3.1 times worse….
It makes no sense to credit abortion for any subsequent improvement in the behavior of the first post-Roe generation, when abortion so dismally failed to keep them on the straight and narrow when they were juveniles. Instead, the most obvious explanation for the ups and downs of the murder rate is the ups and downs of the crack business.
This generation born right after legalization is better behaved today in part because so many of its bad apples are now confined to prisons, wheelchairs, and coffins.
Sailer and Levitt responded to Bennett’s remarks on their blogs, but Levitt’s seems to be down at the moment. [Levitt's blog is up. He downplays the racial angle (smart man), but it's implicit.]
Levitt’s assumptions rest on the belief that abortion reduces the number of “unwanted” babies (of lower-class women), which is why, he argues, crime rates decreased. Sailer says that crime actually went up in the generation after Roe v. Wade, owed in part to the crack epidemic and middle-class black women killing their babies.
In that regard, since middle-class women are more likely to be married than women in the underclass, black babies aborted after the legalization of child killing would’ve had better upbringings than babies born to underclass women. Of course, this whole discussion is unpleasant, but I try real hard not to let my emotions cloud the facts. There’s too much of that going on as it is.
I ask you, why weren’t the media up in arms about Levitt’s book? Because he is not a white conservative man, and it would’ve made for a dull sound bite. It’s as simple as that. If the media don’t cause a firestorm about something, blacks don’t pay much attention to it.
If this post sounds like a rage against black people, that’s because it is. I care more about how we live and think as a people than I do about what whites have to say, including white conservatives.
I’m opening this post for comments so that people can discuss these ideas rationally and respectfully. But be warned. My tolerance level for irrational emotionalism and ad hominem against Bill Bennett, other commenters, and myself is extremely low. In fact, it’s so low I’m liable to ban even first-time offenders. Watch your step.
If you have a meaningful response to Bennett’s comments (i.e., more than just a one-sentence post linking to LBC or others), trackback to this post and I’ll link to you. Haloscan users must trackback with Simpletracks or a similar tool. Please, please, please don’t e-mail the link because I will ignore it. We all could use a refresher course on learning to read carefully and following instructions.
Sources:
- Yahoo! News
- Bill Bennett’s Reality-Based Defenders
- Mr. President, You Owe Bill Bennett an Apology
- Does Bill Bennett Advocate Aborting Black Babies to Reduce Crime?
- The Black Population in the United States (2002)
Update II: Simple facts from a commenter:
Because males commit more violent crime than females, it is also statistically true that aborting all male children, regardless of race, would reduce violent crime….To do so would be monstrous. But saying so doesn’t mean that I hate men. It means that I am mathematically literate.
Update III: Although I should be used to it by now, I continued to be astounded by the paucity of clear thinking and inability to formulate arguments among my black liberal detractors. Some of the comments aren’t getting through not because the person is attacking me; poor reading comprehension, seriously flawed and flat-out incorrect assertions are also offensive. Maybe this post is attracting junior high school students, I don’t know.
There are people trying to get on the board with claims that Bennett says all black babies are prone to violence. Think for one minute, people. Sixty seconds is all I ask. That is not what he said, and you know it. If black men commit over half the violent crimes, can you not comprehend that fewer or no black men would mean fewer violent crimes? But I’m certainly not advocating aborting black babies, and neither is Bennett. Abortion is murder!
You may think Bennett was a dunce for saying it, but a statistic is not “racist.” Please, please, please stop the ignorance! If you have statistics that show the opposite or something different, then by all means, post the darn thing. Anger is one thing and hatred for me is another. I’m not marching in lockstep, so I understand your frustration. But don’t come on this blog using up my bandwidth to drop rants devoid of facts. It’s getting OLD. Use Google or something.
