Elizabeth Warren Calls for a ‘Full-Blown National Conversation About Reparations’
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Thursday delivered a speech at Clark Atlanta University, and declared that it is time to adopt Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s (D-TX) legislation on reparations.
Warren delivered a speech at the historically black university Thursday evening and stressed the need to pass Lee’s reparations legislation, which “establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans.”
“Let’s be clear: It’s time for our government to have a full-blown national conversation about reparations,” Warren wrote in a tweet containing a video of her remarks:
Let’s be clear: It’s time for our government to have a full-blown national conversation about reparations. We must be honest about our history, and do what’s right so that our nation can begin to heal. #AtlantaWithWarren
“America was founded on principles of liberty and built on the backs of enslaved people. [It’s] time to adopt H.R. 40, Sheila Jackson Lee’s reparations plan. [It’s] time to do what’s right, so that our nation can begin to heal,” Warren stated.
The commission, according to the summary, would examine slavery and discrimination from 1619 to the modern era and “recommend appropriate remedies.”
While Warren said that would be a “big step,” she suggested that more must be done.
“This is a big step but slavery is not the only history we must confront. Jim Crow was the lived reality in American up through the 1960s,” Warren said.
She continued:
Government redlining meant that too often, toxic waste dumps and polluting factories were located far away from white communities and right next to black communities. The 1994 crime bill exacerbated the mass incarceration that locked up millions of black men and women. So don’t talk about race-neutral laws. The federal government helped create the racial divide in this country through decades of active state-sponsored discrimination, and that means the federal government has a responsibility to fix it.
The presidential hopeful argued that each of her plans has an element that will address what she considers racial injustice. For instance, she said her Green New Deal plan would “put racial and environmental justice at the center of our response to climate change.”
“My health care plan will bring down the costs of prescription drugs and tackle the risks of black maternal mortality that is literally killing black women and their babies,” she continued, seemingly ignoring her support for abortion and the impact that has had on the black community.
“My public education plan will put 800 billion new dollars in federal money into our public schools and quadruple the funding or schools that teach low-income children. My student debt cancellation plan will help close the black-white wealth gap in America,” she continued, triumphantly declaring that her plans are “all paid for.”
“One more thing about those plans: They are all paid for, not by raising taxes one penny on working families,” she claimed. “They are all paid for by asking the wealthy and well-connected to just pay a fair share.”
“It’s time for a wealth tax in America. Two cents!” she declared.
This is not the first time Warren has signaled support for having a conversation on issuing reparations. She called for a “national, full-blown” conversation” in March:
However, when asked about the “direct transfers of money” during a CNN town hall event in March, Warren dodged the question, instead stressing the need for further conversations.
“If I could just follow up on Georgia’s question, you said you’re open to a conversation about reparations to the descendants of slaves and Native Americans? Might that include direct payments? Direct transfers of money?” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked.
Warren replied:
There’s a lot of ways to think about the way they should be formed. And I noticed Georgia’s question started with the frame of an apology and national recognition. We have a lot of experts around the country, a lot of activists that have a whole lot of different approaches to it and I think the best we can do right now
“I love the idea of this congressional commission, let’s bring people together and let’s open that conversation as Americans. Let’s see what ideas people want to put on the table and let’s talk them through,” she continued.
“Because I have to tell you, ignoring the problem is not working,” she added, failing to answer the specific question.
THE DEPRAVED GHETTO
BLACK CULTURE IN AMERICA - Is it the
world’s most violent subculture?
Dr.
Williams comments on another reality: that the rate of black homicide and armed
robbery as well as other violent crimes are as is as much as 15–30 times more
than whites
So, we have local black gang associates posting terror threats
on social media -- threats of murder, by burning, directed at the women and
children family members of white police employees -- immediately before the
murder, by burning, of the white teenage daughter of a local police department
employee. Plus, the killing took place only minutes after the victim was seen
on video at the same location as the husband or boyfriend of the person who
posted the threats, as he was filling a handheld can with gasoline.
WINDO INTO THE DEPRAVED BLACK
SUBCULTURE
Heather Mac Donald
Public safety
The Social Order
As for interracial violence generally,
blacks disproportionately commit it. Between 2012 and 2015, there
were 631,830 violent interracial victimizations, excluding homicide,
between blacks
and whites, according to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics. Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the U.S.
population, committed 85.5 percent of those victimizations, or 540,360
felonious assaults on
whites, while whites, 61 percent of the
population, committed 14.4 percent, or 91,470 felonious assaults on
blacks. Regarding threats to blacks from the police, a police officer is
18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male
is to be killed by a police officer.
Anti-cop activist Shaun King says that his
involvement in the campaign around the Jazmine Barnes murder was not driven by
reports that a white man had killed the seven-year-old girl, who was gunned
down in Houston on December 30. According to Barnes’s mother and 15-year-old
sister, the white driver of a pickup truck had pulled up next to the family’s
car before opening fire. The accusation set off a frenzy of hate-crime
allegations and blanket coverage by the New York Times. King offered a $100,000
reward to anyone who located the suspect.
As it turned out, Jazmine Barnes was
killed by two black men, who opened fire on her mother’s car because they
thought that they were targeting enemies of their gang. King passed along a tip
about the real killers to the Houston police, and now says that he merely
“internalized the pain of the family and tried to search as if it were my own
child who was killed.” Race, in other words, had nothing to do with his
activism.
It’s worth remembering, though, the many
other black children who have been victims of drive-by shootings without
leading King to launch a national crusade.
A sampling: in March 2015, a six-year-old
boy was killed in a drive-by shooting on West Florissant Avenue in St. Louis,
as Black Lives Matter protesters were converging on the Ferguson, Missouri,
Police Department to demand the resignation of the entire department. In August
2015, a nine-year-old girl was killed by a bullet from a drive-by shooting in
Ferguson while doing her homework in her bedroom, blocks from the Black Lives
Matter rioting thoroughfare. Five children were shot in Cleveland over the 2015
Fourth of July weekend. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago that same
weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In Cincinnati, in July 2015, a
four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old girl was left
paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings. In
Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September 2015,
leading the black police chief to break down in tears and ask why the community
only protests shootings of blacks when the perpetrator is a cop. In November
2015, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his
father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. All
told, ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore in 2015;
twelve victims were between the age of ten and seventeen.
In 2016, a three-year-old girl in
Baltimore was partially paralyzed by a drive-by shooting. In Chicago in 2016,
two dozen children under the age of 12 were shot in drive-bys, including a
three-year-old boy mowed down on Father’s Day 2016 who is now paralyzed for
life and a ten-year-old boy shot in August; his pancreas, intestines, kidney,
and spleen were torn apart. A Jacksonville 22-month-old was shot to death by a
passing car last June. In September, three men killed three-year-old Azalya
Anderson in a drive-by in Sacramento, and a week before Christmas in
Bridgeport, a 12-year-old boy was shot and killed on his way home from the
candy store in a drive-by shooting.
Why did King let these shootings of black
children go by without responding as he did to Jazmine Barnes’s murder? Could
it be because the perpetrators were black? You could end all white shootings of
black children tomorrow and it would have zero effect on the death rate of
black children by homicide, because such white-on-black shootings are extremely
rare. Moral abominations, like the 2015 Charleston church massacre by white
supremacist Dylann Roof, are aberrations that belong to the outermost lunatic
fringe of American society. The country’s revulsion at the Charleston carnage
was immediate and universal, resulting in a movement to banish the Confederate
flag, embraced by Roof as a white supremacist symbol, from official
sites.
If Shaun King and other Black Lives Matter
activists really want to save black children from the trauma of urban violence,
they should put their efforts into rebuilding inner-city culture—above all, by
revalorizing a married father as the best gift a mother can give her child.
Fantasies about white violence against “black bodies” are a distraction from
what is actually happening on American streets.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith
Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and
the author of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes
Everyone Less Safe and The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering
Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
Walter Williams tackles the elephant
in the room on crime
Dr. Williams is a well known conservative economist and longtime
John Olin Chair faculty at George Mason University in eastern Virginia, author
of 12 books and syndicated columnist. In the past, he has been
substitute host on the Rush Limbaugh radio program. He is almost
like family to me, and I have benefited from his essays and books over the
years. This past week, I saw and read his essay on disparities in crime rates among races that was picked up
by Military in its October 2019 issue. What got Dr. Williams going
was the article by Matthew DeLisi of Iowa State U and John Paul
Wright of the U of Cincinnati titled "What Criminologists Don't Say and
Why."
Dr. Williams confirms that the writers are right about the liberal
tilt of criminologists — "If criminologists have the guts to even talk
about a race-crime connection, it's behind closed doors and in guarded
language. Any discussion about race and crime ... can mean the end
of one's professional career."
Dr. Williams points out teen black-on-white predatory behavior —
chronicled in detail by many, particularly Colin Flaherty, whose investigative reports appear frequently (more than 100) at American Thinker — cannot be reported,
mentioned, or considered by the media, politicians, criminologists,
commentators, politicians, even law enforcement people without risking being
called racist, the easy epithet used to enforce a ban on talking about the
realities of racial disparities in crime and the increasingly violent nature of
black violence against whites — the knockout game, polar bear hunting, flash
mob violence against people and property.
Referencing the Wright and DeLisi report, Dr. Williams comments on
another reality: that the rate of black homicide and armed robbery as well as
other violent crimes are as is as much as 15–30 times more than whites, for example, and he points out the silliness of criminologists'
claims that mass incarceration rather than criminality has decimated the black
community. He favorably quotes Wright and DeLisi when they say,
"What they [criminals] did, in reality was to prey on their neighbors."
Dr. Williams returns to a theme he has explored many times before
in this essay and commentary when he points out that the black family of the
past was two parents and stable, even back to days of slavery, and that the
black community was moral and law-abiding. "The strong
character of black people is responsible for the great progress made from
emancipation to today. ... [T]oday's conduct among black youth wouldn't have
been tolerated yesteryear."
My regret is there aren't enough Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell
types to engage the nutty attitudes of liberal chatterbox experts.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. is an
emergency physician, sheriff's medical officer and inactive attorney, policy
and science adviser to the American Council on Science and Health of NYC and
the Heartland Institute of Chicago.
CITY JOURNAL
BLACK ON BLACK VIOLENCE Data,
of crime and policing than this weekend’s demonstrations suggest.
The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data
flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived
Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional
blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black
homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of
Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in
this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are
only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide
deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014
and 2015.
Who is
killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks.
In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and
dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings
as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent
resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police
have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the
police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a
black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.
Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade,
though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly
worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of
officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all
homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only
243.
Violent
crime has now risen by a significant amount for two consecutive years. The
total number of violent crimes rose 4.1 percent in 2016, and estimated
homicides rose 8.6 percent. In 2015, violent crime rose by nearly 4 percent and
estimated homicides by nearly 11 percent. The last time violence rose two years
in a row was 2005–06. The reason for the current increase is what I have
called the Ferguson Effect. Cops are backing off of proactive policing in
high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened.
Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter
activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning
someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are
instead just driving by. Such stops are discretionary; cops don’t have to make
them. And when political elites demonize the police for just such proactive
policing, we shouldn’t be surprised when cops get the message and do less of
it. Seventy-two percent of the nation’s officers say that they and their
colleagues are now less willing to stop and question suspicious persons,
according to a Pew Research poll released in January 2016. The reason is the persistent
anti-cop climate.
Four
studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased.
If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against
whites. That truth has not stopped the ongoing demonization of the
police—including, now, by many of the country’s ignorant professional athletes.
The toll will be felt, as always, in the inner city, by the thousands of
law-abiding people there who desperately want more police protection.
*
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