FrA review of the best commentary on and around the world... Todays must-read There are sensible conservative responses to the ongoing violence in Ferguson, Missouri following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Unfortunately, writes the National Reviews Charles CW Cooke, many of his ideological brethren are going about choosing another route. Instead of cautioning against a rush to judgment, denouncing the rioting as counterproductive or offering evidence that white-on-black violence is not prevalent, he writes, many seem eager to point out that black-on-black violence is the real problem. It is indisputably true that the United States has a problem with blacks killing blacks, Cooke writes. And yet this has absolutely nothing to do with the question at hand, which is: Did a police officer unjustifiably kill an unarmed black man in Missouri? He continues: It is feasible, is it not, to be worried about the internecine violence in Americas inner cities and to want to get to the bottom of an allegedly unwarranted shooting? So why the conflation? After all, whether or not it is intentional, reacting to a communitys grief by raising an entirely separate topic smacks largely of distraction - of reflexively throwing up a roadblock to what is a legitimate line of inquiry in the hope that the subject might swiftly be changed. Police shootings like the one in Missouri open old and real wounds, Cooke says. Conservatives should acknowledge that. Moreover, he adds, police shootings have the imprimatur of the state, which makes them more disturbing than civilian violence: Even if the United States did not boast a history in which blacks were routinely disfavoured, beaten, and even murdered by the governments that were ostensibly established to protect them, there would still be something distinct about being killed or hurt by a man in uniform. With Cookes criticism in mind, then, consider the following passage from an on-the-scene in East St Louis, Illinois, piece by National Reviews Kevin Williamson that also currently appears the magazines website: Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka!White devil! F*** you, white devil! The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, hes more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom - I assume shes his mom - is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity and amusement, as though to say: Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil? New York magazines Jonathan Chait offers his take on what he sees as the racist overtones of the piece: When the writer … decides the best comparison for a young black kids behaviour is a monkey and to gratuitously question his parentage, theres really not much question, is there?om the BBC
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 02:56:09 +0000
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