I wish her the best of luck.

Keep up the good work, Ms. Barber

Monika Brooks

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0007,hsiao,12566,3.html

R/

Foreign U.S. To Reduce Troop Levels In Iraq After December Elections Al-Zarqawi’s Jordan Family Renounces Him 200,000 Protest Terrorist Attacks…

I must apologize for my lack of spreading link love around these last few days, but between RINO Sightings and this monster that took me a couple of days to think thr…

Time to introduce a new neighbor — this week it’s La Shawn Barber.

As usual, anytime you post on anything to do with race, it causes a firestorm of comments. I only wish I hadn’t been out of pocket at a law enforcement / security technology seminar, and had the opportunity to get in at the beginning of the discussion.

A lot of the comments have made good points, and I think that the heavy participation that takes place when you post about subjects like this indicates a need for this country to begin to have a more open and frank dialog about race, culture, racial preferences, and racism (both perceived and actual).

Oh, and BTW Mctank, what part of OK are you blogging from? As a 20 year cop who lives and works in Tulsa, you have gotten my curiosity aroused (guess I’ll have to check out your blog).

> If you don’t think the attitudes of the gatekeepers
> of media influence the presentation of news,
> then I don’t know what to tell you.

Naw, I said myself I didn’t trust the source. My point was that concerning the public getting an idea that there is a crazily high violent crime rate among blacks, that this is true, no matter what media does with it. Though I will grant you, they probably make it worse (as they do anything).

As for who is more likely to commit a crime, the problem is that ‘statistics’ are generalities; here in NE Oklahoma, no black is likely to harm me. Not because they are all saints, but because there are damn few of them (and I’m probably related to half). Now if I drive in ANY direction I find more, but in my little town, there aren’t many. My town land was donated by the natives and so, there are tons of natives (of about a dozen diff tribes) and a variety of immigrants from guatamala, micronesia, china, but not many blacks, oddly. I say oddly because it’s a nice town and I see no particular reason why blacks wouldn’t want to live here. In my little girl’s school, she had only one classmate who was black (or as she put it at age 6, there was ____ who was the tall boy, and ___ who was the girl with the brown face).

But in Culver City CA where I used to live, where walking through the mall made me think, “Gee… I am one of the few whites in the room, I guess now I know how it feels to be a minority!”… the stats would be different.

Anyway I agree with your point, that the perception is overdone. Sometimes I think this gets into what I said elsewhere, a cultural issue; marauding packs of skinheads in NY for example are recognized as ‘skinheads’ not ‘whites’, whereas you could have 250 completely unrelated, different blacks alone or in groups who behaved badly and they would all just be seen as ‘blacks’ to most others. I think often the black race pays the price for that, socially (perhaps this is simply a variant on the they-all-look-alike-to-me theme).

> If there was a REAL representation of crime depicted
> in the media, you’d understand that there are far
> more WHITE criminals than there are black criminals.

I believe you. Maybe I don’t pay as much attention in that case, or, maybe the media makes a big story out of it if the people are black and puts it on page B-6 if they’re not. I haven’t really studied this. I did once do a serious study on the media related to Northern Ireland and was so aghast at the bias that reached “outright lie” proportion that it really disillusioned me. Perhaps it is that way with any topic one cares to study.

> you as a white person has far more to fear from other
> whites statistically, than from black folks like me.

Well yes, but that’s like the statistic that most car accidents happen close to home: I interact with vastly more white people than I do black people, since the blacks even in my family are a minority (and definitely are in my locale). There are more white people, with more white interaction, so there’s going to be more crime.

> You see, it’s these kinds of statements that
> raise the tempeture a bit in the room.

Well thanks for responding well…

> You probably don’t mean to do it, but

Actually, I don’t. And I think that most everybody including me has a lot of totally unconscious stuff that amounts to racism, translateable as assumption and stereotype, even below the level of conscious operation. I am for sure in any debate going to say something unusually stupid and rude that I had no intent for, simply because the problem with ignorance is, ya don’t know you’re ignorant when you are, or you wouldn’t be. Anyway, I’m sorry about that (after the fact, though it could happen again if I keep talking). I am open to education, though accidentally obtuse on occasion.

> insinuating that only language characteristics
> and mannerisms you feel psycologically
> compatible with are “acting like a normal
> human.”

True I suppose. I would say, though, that what I am saying is normal is what is “average based on the environment.” When someone walks into an environ that is clean and neat, calm and quiet, and acts so differently that they openly shock everybody in the room (with race not even being an issue here), then I would say that person is not acting ‘normal’ (since the word normal is a stupid word, but at best would mean ‘average’). Had they been a group of white Texas cheerleaders behaving so rudely, it would have been just as shocking. (But, as I know more white chicks than black families, that probably would have less stereotype effect on me.)

> I guarantee you if you were at a repair shop on 18th
> Avenue in Brooklyn, or Macon, GA during a NASCAR race,
> the ambiance of the waiting room would not resemble
> C-SPAN’s “Book Notes.” Would you cast aspersions on “white culture” at that point?

Ah, but you have just taken the discussion out of the context here: that is a completely different environ. Trust me, even the environ in a speedway rally here in nowhere Oklahoma with a bunch of rednecks is pretty nutso by any standard–loud and chaotic and frenetic, no doubt. You are–in response perhaps to my doing so–reverse implying that a calm, quiet environ is “white” and I don’t think that’s the case; surely there is every range of social environ for people, no matter what their race. Part of being a well adapted person is being able to adapt to your environment.

I think this almost starts to mosey into the topic of integration and assimilation except on a more individual level perhaps. Back when I had 2-length tri-color hair (and a real gutter mouth) I didn’t fit in well with the church ladies anymore, but I was capable of putting on a hat and behaving well in the city library; I didn’t consider it an affront to my culture that I was expected to be relatively neat and quiet in a public place.

> Second, I doubt you’ve delved deeply enough into American
> History and Sociology if you think that White America
> has “hesitant” to express their disdain for non-whites.
> I guess taking 190 years to get Civil Rights on paper isn’t a big enough hint for some folks.

Well, I do have some edu there but not a great deal, but not geared toward the areas most affecting blacks and this discussion.

La Shawn’s post, and the spawning article, and the original comments, stemmed from a specific case of a comment that MODERN whites often feel inhibited from speaking what they wish about many issues where race overlaps the topic, because they fear being called a racist. Going back to the founding of the nation and the civil rights stuff is taking this out of context; I am sorry for history, but I didn’t do it, wasn’t there, and can only speak for my own little world. In that world, I’m a white person who has often been highly restrained about comments for fear of appearing racist, and I know many many others who have–the topic has even come up in conversations in business, in the social world, in family circles, over the years. So, I consider this a valid point and a real experience that I and others have… currently.

You know, this brings to mind something for me; women were treated like shit in several important ways until pretty recently as well. But I don’t think I have ever brought up, with a man in conversation even when the topic was men vs. women or more personalized similar issues, the issue of how long it took women to get the right to not be beat by their husbands let alone vote let alone work the same jobs for even marginally comparable pay. Probably because I was not raised with that atrocious history hanging over my people, my self-image, and my future; by the time I learned about this I was already an adult, and I didn’t have any sense of “fighting to be an equal” because I always considered myself to be one. Maybe in that case my ignorance was bliss.

> I get it, though. –Cobra

Thanks for being decent about it.