Today's U.S. prisons also have a disproportionate number of people of color. Apparently, one of the elements of many crimes in the U.S. is to be non-white.

Unfortunately most of the perpetrators and victims of crime continue to be persons of color.

Hmm, I'm still puzzled somewhat about all the controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright's assertion that America rests upon a foundation of genocide, slavery, and white supremacy. Am I missing something?

Prisons are the new form of slave labor. Keep in mind many private prisons "pay" prisoners pathetic amounts to do unskilled labor. Thus, a guilty prisoner is, in effect, slave labor. But far worse, an innocent prisoner, railroaded into prison by an unfair judicial system, is indicia of organized slave capture and labor.

I watched the segment Friday night. Chilling.

The worst part about this is that if an African-American had written this book, no one would be talking about it -- not NPR, not PBS, not A Tiny Revolution.

People act surprised when they hear that these insidious things persist. Take a look in the mirror folks -- you're why these things persist.

I'm why these things persist, I can tell you that much. This just shocked the fucking hell out of me, and the fact that it did is making me feel pretty disgusting about myself. Which, hopefully, is the first step in some sort of right direction.

Anonymous at June 24, 2008 06:08 PM
Bill Moyers alludes to that in his segment. This is to be taken seriously because it's got a Wall Street Journal fingerprint. Never mind that, as Coldtype said, Rev Wright has been shouting much of the same from the rooftops for ages. But he is "shrill" and "racist," of course.

As for looking in the mirror, that's not the issue. Americans look in the mirror 24/7 and always love what they see. They need to be bombarded with pictures like those I posted.
Germans didn't denazify because they saw the errors of their ways. They did it because it was a nonnegotiable condition for their reentry into civilization.

Ok Gringo, let's grant that the data you linked to is correct. Why is the rate higher? Is it possible that racism and the effects of racism are involved somehow?

Germans didn't denazify because they saw the errors of their ways. They did it because it was a nonnegotiable condition for their reentry into civilization.

Problem izzat, bernard, there's nobody to hold us--me, as well as the likes of the feculent Gringo--to the standards of civilization we enforced on the losers in ww ii...

Gringo

Your statistic is utterly meaningless.
It's just as meaningless as saying that people who live on the fourth floor of a building are much more likely to be murderers than people who live on the second floor. That fact is obviously true. And it is utterly meaningless (except for telling us that murders are an urban phenomenon and rural dwellings tend not to have a 4th floor).

So before you throw around numbers like that with a strangely racist connotation perhaps you should consider variables such as: regional (north-south); rural vs urban; socio-economics.

You will find that, in fact, once you factor in all the obvious control variables, there is no compelling evidence that blacks are more likely to kill than white folks.

Woody

You're wrong. There's an institution to hold America to the standards it held the losers of WWII. It's called A Tiny Revolution.
We call it tiny to better hide its awesome power!

Gringo: Was that committed murder or CONVICTED of committing murder. There is a difference.

Two words: communist photography.

How low the Wall Street Journal has sunk!

Thank God Obama is speaking out about this issue by lecturing those no goood, lazy and shiftless black fathers.

If only they had been law abiding and saved their slave wages in a nice white owned bank then in a few centuries they could achieve something.

I can't wait for Obama's next lecture to the country praising the fine and upstanding police officers, judges and business owners that tried to really help the black men in their community by showing them the right way to think and behave.

Too bad the black men just did'nt or could'nt listen like Obama did when he was growing up

I agree Sam. Black children should do what Obama did and be born into an upwardly-mobile family that could handle domestic strife, if any, because it had the wealth of a previous generation to rely on. If black babies were smart, instead of shiftless, they'd be certain to ensure that their only real problems are existential emotional ones, like Obama's biological father being absent while a real, caring stepfather was IN HIS PLACE instead choosing to have a missing father because the police are far more likely to arrest, and the courts to convict, a black man of a drug crime than a white man even though whites use more drugs and commit more drug crimes per capita than blacks.

And, hey, it's not like Obama is alone in such criticism. Didn't you hear how McCain criticized white unwed mothers because they make up a disproportionate majority of welfare rolls? And what about the mainstream media's condemnation of white criminality, since whites do more harm to society per capita than ANY other racial group (viewed by number of deaths AND economic damage) since the most devastating criminal offenders are corporations and whites make up a disproportionate share of corporate leadership? It's a good thing those things occurred so that Obama's criticism is put in proper context.

Oh, wait, none of that happened and much of it is fucking impossible -- oops, my mistake. I guess my original position, that Obama is an oreo shilling to racists because, as Arthur Silber (a real white dude) has pointed out many a time before, you gotta be white to succeed in a white power structure.

Silly me.

And, um, btw: the total shift of wealth -- a.k.a. theft -- from blacks to whites AFTER slavery was formally abolished during the 20th century measures into the trillions (something I read in Lies My Teacher Told Me). Wealthy whites, no slouches they, invested the money in society to maintain a hiearchy that slowed social mobility even when Jim Crow was formally abolished. Then, after the investment was made and the dividends began pouring in, they declared the system, at long last, fair! Weeee!

'The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.' — William Faulkner

You guys are right about Obama. Everytime he goes on one these beat-up-on-AfAms rants, my stomach turns. That and his FISA capitulation make me sick to think he represents the enlightened liberalism of the day. And I'm a supporter.

As far as fixing problems like these, B.C. is of course right that people don't make big changes unless it costs them something not to. And government and big business (at government's urging) has to institute those costs. My point about the mirror is that without an informed advocacy group to push federal legislators on these things, they will keep going as they have.

One (relatively) small piece of the harm done, but a good example of how the poisonous effects live on, is felon disenfranchisement.

There are people who appear to argue in good faith, despite the history and geographic distribution of laws denying or making difficult the right of felons who've served their sentences to vote, that such laws are not racist in their intent. (It's pretty much impossible to argue that they're not racist in effect.)

Getting the history of judicial re-enslavement known and understood will put a necessary sock in that line of argument, and help the expanding effort to end felon disenfranchisement.

We're almost alone in the world in denying the vote to ex-felons, which would be a point of shame even if we weren't one of the world leaders in per-capita imprisonment. Given that we are, the massive scale of the disenfranchisement is beyond shameful.

This is a hugely important point, Nell. That, too, is the legacy of slavery: the very notion that one can be a sub-citizen out in the world.

Learning that this went on makes me think of what US whites outside the South were doing to Blacks during the same decades, as summarized in James Loewen's "Sundown Towns": forcing them through violence out of the vast areas of the country they'd lived peacefully in during Reconstruction, resulting in the urban concentrations of them we now consider normal.

The earlier comment about looking in the mirror hits home, as I've got foul, bullying white relatives in the South who would have been just the kind to do stuff like this. Combining knowledge of this with what people of European ancestry have done on continent after continent just makes me feel kinda sick.

And Rush Limbaugh's still focusing white ire on the lies about Black crime during Katrina. Makes me wanna spend a day reading Tim Wise.