The first black president is also a president for blacks first.
The president sent his “thoughts and prayers” to Trayvon’s family.
To George Zimmerman, painted as a racist monster for 16 months, hiding in fear of his life, his Peruvian mother and family under threat – not a word of compassion from the president.
Obama moved swiftly off the trial and into a rambling discourse on the black experience and racial profiling.
But why? The jury said Trayvon was not profiled.
What is Obama up to? Answer. A law professor, he knows this case, based on evidence and testimony, was open and shut. And he knows Eric Holder is not going to file any hate-crime civil rights charges.
Because Holder and Obama know they would be seen as caving to Sharpton & Co., they would get stuffed in court, and the nation would react with outrage to a double-jeopardy, murder-charge, racial prosecution of this persecuted man whose innocence was established in a court of law.
So Obama swiftly changed the subject.
“There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me … before I was a senator.”
“There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”
“That happens often,” said Obama. Undeniably. But why do black males awaken such apprehensions and fears? Is it their color?
Well, 13 percent of our population is black. Half of that – say, 6 plus percent – is male. Of that 6 percent, one in six – just 1 percent of the U.S. population – consists of black males age 18 to 29.
Of all black males 18 to 29, writes Ron Unz in “Race and Crime in America,” 28 percent are in jail or prison, or on probation.
The “liberal Sentencing Project organization,” says Unz, estimates that “one-third of all black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban areas.”
Twenty years ago in Chicago, where black kids are gunned down daily, Jesse Jackson was quoted, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
That’s the same apprehension, Mr. President, those women feel on that elevator.
Obama traced the “violence … in poor black neighborhoods” to “poverty and … a very difficult history.”
But slavery and segregation were far closer in time to the black America of the 1950s, and poverty was far greater. Yet we never saw crime and incarceration rates like we see today in black America.
As Unz writes, El Paso, Texas, and Atlanta are cities of equal size and poverty rates. Yet Atlanta has 10 times the crime. Oakland and Santa Ana, Calif., are equal in size and poverty numbers. Yet Oakland “has several times the rate of crime.” Why?
Why are white folks nervous about strange young black men in the neighborhood? Perhaps because they commit interracial muggings, robberies and rapes at 35 times the rate of whites.
As newspapers avoid the issue of black racism and rarely give the stats on interracial crime, Obama dwelt lovingly on the indignities of racial profiling – without really addressing the root cause.
It was an uncourageous commentary. Weak as Kool-Aid, said Tavis.
But Obama was where he likes to be, leading from behind – this time behind Al Sharpton.
“Hate crimes are extraordinary in unexpected ways. In addition to being among the most serious crimes, NCV data show that approximately 84 percent of these assaults are violent—a sexual assault, robbery or simple aggravated assault.” And, “Blacks are less likely than both whites and Hispanics to be targeted for reasons of racial hatred.
A significantly higher percentage of victims of violent racial hatred say their attackers were black.” “Nine out of 10 of them identify their race as the reason blacks targeted them.” “For victims reporting white offenders, [only] about three in ten victims cited race as a motive.”
Moreover, and this is crucial, “The number of black hate crime victims was so small, that is statistically insignificant, that it precluded analysis of the race of persons who victimized them.” (Page 36)
As a perplexed alien from outer space will have noted, data don’t move the impious, progressive people of the West; a different drumbeat does. The tom-tom comes from the talkers on the television. Media megaphones dictate —and all political factions accept—that the category of hate crimes applies de facto to white-on-black crime.
Yet white-on-black hate crimes are practically (and certainly statistically) non-existent. These are manufactured myths.
