GO AWAY GHETTO BITCH! WALLOW IN YOUR IGNORANCE! INFLICT YOUR VIOLENCE ON YOURSELF!
ONE OF THE BIGGEST HOAXES EVER PERPETRATED ON AMERICA IS BLACK LIVES MATTER. TAKE A LOOK AT THE WEEKEND BLACK ON BLACK SHOOTING NUMBERS IN CHICAGO ALONE!
Jones also had at least 40 criminal cases on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River during the past 12 years. Those charges included aggravated assault, terroristic threats, theft, forgery, weapons possession, drug, assault, and sex crimes. In July of 2021, three domestic violence charges were brought against him. Jones had been “homeless” and living in streets and subway stations for roughly six years.
Black ‘thought leader’ condemns ‘white people’ as irredeemable bigots, suggests reparations aren’t enough
I had never heard of Yaba Blay until today, but she describes herself as one of the “foremost thought leaders” in fields like “Black racial identity, colorism, and beauty politics,” or, simply, black cultural Marxism. Needless to say, all Blay’s scholarly pursuits yielded zero intellectual gains, reaping only supremacist views and hatred, a fact on prominent display in the video below:
(She has a Venmo for digital panhandling? How mortifying.)
“White people, I need you to know that your money will not assuage you from your guilt. You cannot pay your way out of this. There aren’t enough reparations in the world that you can pay us.”
Many of us, like myself, don’t actually harbor any guilt because we never owned slaves, and it’s not like American slavery was some unprecedented system deserving of unprecedented political action. Slavery has been around since the dawn of time, and every color person under the sun has been found under its yoke, including “white” European women who were traded across the Arab Muslim trade, with a majority suffering as sexual chattel instead of laborers.
So, naturally, I don’t grovel and willingly hand over my money to black people like Blay who think I owe them the fruits of my labor and sacrifice simply because I have “white” skin; it’s an idea as asinine as demanding those with black skin pay for a system in which they had no part, to compensate me, a white female of European descent, for the tragic experiences of people long gone whose only relation to me is we happen to have like genetic characteristics (sex and skin color).
However, I’m routinely extorted to pay for reparations, whether it’s the welfare system (the largest in the world or college tuition for affirmative action recipients—but now I’m finally off the hook for all those massive taxpayer drains, so thank you Miss. Blay! No amount of money is good enough, therefore it would be futile and foolish to fork over billions of dollars to try to assuage the victim mentalities of people like this; as she said, she’s going to spend our money and still “tell us” that we are “racists.”
Also, get this: a cursory internet search revealed that Blay is a first-generation American, whose parents are from… drum roll please…. Ghana. Gee, how ironic. (Ghana, once a British colony known as the Gold Coast, previously served as a major supply hub for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and was home to countless African, black, slave traders. I’d be willing to bet that Blay has some slave-trade blood in her, somewhere along the line.)
When I hear Blay say “white people … you cannot pay your way out of this,” and “this” being the manufactured narrative in which “white people” are inherently oppressive because of our skin color and therefore we owe non-whites something, I wonder, what is it that they want then?
To be honest, my mind goes to South Africa, and the “white” experience of not being able to “pay” your way out of the problem. It wasn’t enough for the whites to fund the government to make direct reparations payments to black residents, and it wasn’t enough to seize the land of the white farmers and redistribute it to the black non-farmers.
You know what has seemed to be “enough” though? Rape, torture, and bloodshed.
Jewish Lives Matter
But not to BLM, myriad politicians, or the establishment media.
Wed Sep 16, 2020
With many in America on bended knee as an expression of solidarity with Black Lives Matter (BLM), it is imperative to point out that Jewish lives matter as well. The mainstream media has, however, ignored BLM racism and antisemitism. While the mainstream media covered extensively the so-called “peaceful protests” stemming from the killing by police of George Floyd, it has ignored, and deliberately obfuscated, the violence, riots, and lootings during the demonstrations initiated by the BLM and the terrorist Antifa organization. Moreover, it overlooked the damage done to Jewish religious institutions and businesses, which carried an antisemitic overtone. The media honed in on Black victimhood, but has looked the other way on the killing of American Jews in Jersey City, Brooklyn, and Monsey late last year, by African Americans. These killings did not result in a national outcry or a mainstream media frenzy.
It is not only Jews that BLM vilifies, it has created a blood libel against Israel - the Jewish state. The BLM manifesto accuses Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. This simply amounts to a Nazi-like libel, not only because it is downright false and unfounded, but it is intended to generate hate and hostility against Jews. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, the most revered civil-rights leader, and the most distinguished African American leader in recent history, admonished an African American student who bad-mouthed Zionism at a Harvard University dinner. Dr. King snapped at him and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism.”
The BLM manifesto labels Israel an “apartheid state,” and it is calling for the total academic, cultural, and economic boycott of Israel. Much like the BDS movement, it singles out Israel. No such demand is made by BLM against any other state. The Marxist-left, and intersectionality have excluded Jews and Israel in their chart of “victims.” Proof of the BLM lie about Israel is the fact that Israel saved tens of thousands of Black Africans from Ethiopia who openly requested to come to Israel by choice, not by force. Who, more than Jews, have suffered for over 2,000 years of persecution, expulsion, inquisition, pogroms, and the Holocaust? And yes, in America, Jews have known discrimination, and unending prejudice. Israel, likewise, has endured Arab boycotts, wars that intended its destruction, and indiscriminate terror by Palestinian-Arabs. In fact, the BLM exclusion of Jews, and deliberately ignoring Jewish suffering is racist in itself. In BLM’s worldview, Jews are White people, and therefore “oppressors.” Israeli Jews defending their families and their country against their would-be murderers are deemed by the BLM to be “committing genocide against Palestinians.”
Jewish lives didn’t matter much to America during the Holocaust. While Six Million Jews were being systematically murdered by the Nazi Germans, the Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) administration shut America’s doors to Europe’s Jews. The U.S. at the time, supported the British ‘White Paper Policy’ that barred Jews from entering Palestine. Thus, the allies provided a ‘green light’ for Hitler’s Final Solution. During that same period, the mainstream media (especially the New York Times) in the U.S. largely ignored or hid the extent of the Holocaust against the Jews of Europe. Similarly, today, the same media is largely ignoring the victimization of Jews by Blacks, and the racist and antisemitic ranting by the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. Insofar as the liberal mainstream media is concerned, only Blacks are allowed to claim “victimhood,” and Whites are invariably “racist.”
Jacob Blake Sr., whose 29-year-old son was shot seven times by the Kenosha, WI, police officer when he resisted arrest, has a history of racist and antisemitic posts on Facebook. A follower of Farrakhan whom he frequently echoes, Blake repeated the canard of “Jewish controlled media.” He stated on that the Jewish victims of the antisemitic attack at Pittsburgh’s ‘Tree of Life’ synagogue, were warned ahead of time of the attack. He referred to Whites and Jews as “crackers,” and “pink toes,” and described White and Jewish women as “Hoes.” Blake Sr. is not, however, the only Black to incite anti-Jewish hate. Rapper Ice Cube, TV host Nick Cannon, and Philadelphia Eagle’s football player DeSean Jackson, used similar antisemitic and racist messages emanating from their guru, Farrakhan. Still, in order to curry favor with Black voters, Vice President Joe Biden, a contender for the U.S. presidency, graced Blake with a personal visit.
While there are multiple prominent Blacks expressing racist and antisemitic hate, there are also prominent Blacks opposing it. In the early 1990’s, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars, in which he condemned what he termed as ‘Rising Black antisemitism.’ Basketball legend Kareem Abdul Jabbar wrote (7/14/2020) that,“Recent incidents of antisemitic tweets and posts from sports and entertainment celebrities are a very troubling omen for the future of the BLM movement, but so too is the shocking lack of massive indignation. Given the new woke-fulness in Hollywood and the sports world, we expect more passionate public outrage. What we got was a shrug of meh-rage.”
A shortened chronicle of events taking place within a space of weeks illustrates the intolerance and antisemitism displayed by African Americans toward Jews. On December 24, 2019, the New York City Police Department released a video showing a group of Black teenagers assaulting a 23-year old Hasidic Jewish man in Brooklyn. A few days earlier, a 34-year old Black woman named Tiffany Harris attacked three Jewish women in front of their young children in Brooklyn. The 34-year old woman admitted to the police, “Yes, I slapped them. I cursed them. I said F… you Jews.” She was released shortly after being arrested. More violent and deadly assaults on Jews took place on December 10, 2019, in a Jersey City Kosher supermarket, where three people were murdered by Black racist antisemites. On the seventh day of Chanukah, 2019, a Black antisemite with a machete cut down and severely injured five Hasidic Jews at a home of a Chabad rabbi, in Monsey, New York. The rabbi, among the injured, subsequently died as a result of his injuries. A month earlier, a young Israeli exchange student was verbally assaulted and threatened on a busy New York subway, and once again, the perpetrator was a Black man. The police stood by doing nothing.
On July 19, 2020, the Santa Barbara News Press reported, “In what is a widely underreported event, protesters from the Black Lives Matter group of Los Angeles purposely met in the oldest Jewish neighborhood in the region to destroy Jewish businesses, schools and synagogues. In all, they managed to loot a large number of stores, three Jewish schools and five synagogues. The next day, locals woke up to scrawled graffitied images reading an obscene message attacking Jews, ‘Free Palestine,’ and, perhaps scariest of all, “Kill the Jews!”
Hate crimes against Jews by African Americans does not fit the progressive media playbook. For the media and the politicians, African Americans are permanent “victims,” and therefore cannot be racist or antisemitic. To the Marxist BLM movement, Jewish Lives don’t matter, but what is even more shameful is that it is the same for some politicians and the major media.
The Sound of Murder
"Broken windows" policing and emphasis on family could have saved a life.
October 6, 2023 by Danusha Goska 12 Comments
|
On Saturday, September 2, 2023, I woke from sleep at four a.m. and looked out my window in search of the waning moon. Media had described the second full moon of August as a “blue moon” and a “super moon” and I hadn’t yet seen it.
I saw some black men partying on the sidewalk around Costello Park. Lately the park has become a site of all-night parties. Men gather on the sidewalk after sunset and remain till near dawn. I’d estimate about fifteen partiers. They sit on milk crates and metal chairs that Paterson, as part of a renovation, using taxpayer dollars from wealthier towns, placed in Costello Park. The metal chairs have been dragged out of the park onto the sidewalk for the all-night parties. Eventually these chairs, one by one, are disappearing entirely.
Car stereos blast rap music. There are kids in this building, black kids, Hispanic kids, poor kids. I grew up poorer than these kids, but I never had to struggle for sleep against intrusive noise pollution. I never had to sleep through classes in school because there was so much noise in the street the night before. Loud street parties were just not done. In my hometown, fathers left for work before we left for school. They worked hard all day. They arrived home in worn blue uniforms stained with dirt and grease. They ate dinner, they watched TV for a short while, and then they snored in comfortable chairs till wives or kids gently roused them and ushered them to bed. These hard-working men needed sleep, and the town was quiet at night.
I mentioned the noise in a Facebook post. I met Merlin when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley. Merlin is handsome, witty, and charismatic. He’s a PhD, polyamorist, international bon vivant, and Burning Man veteran. He lived on Grizzly Peak, 1,400 feet up in the Berkeley Hills, where even small homes cost over a million dollars. As night follows day, Merlin said that my mentioning Paterson’s noise was racist. Only a white supremacist would gripe about loud and obscene rap from car stereos all night long.
“Noise pollution loudest in black neighborhoods” announced a 2017 headline. “This is yet another study that shows that communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of pollution … [noise pollution] makes things worse for everybody,” UC Berkeley researchers reported. What does it do to children’s little bodies to emerge into a world of car stereos, police sirens, screams, crashes? Noise pollution damages children’s minds and bodies in all the ways described here. And the all-night partiers don’t just pollute with noise. They leave trash like paper plates and plastic bottles scattered on the sidewalk around the park.
I didn’t see the moon on September 2. I had been at the window for less than a minute. I returned to bed. I heard a crash. My nerves burst into flames; my muscles stiffened; my breath became rapid and shallow; my stomach clenched and poured out acid. I have become very familiar with this bodily response to stressful stimuli. I’m an adult and can try to quell this response with practiced prayer and meditation. I know that Paterson’s majority minority children are too young to master these skills and, as a teacher, I know that they suffer in ways that I don’t.
I investigated the apartment. I couldn’t find the source of the crashing sound. I went back to bed and tried to sleep. I had to get up early the next morning to work. Sleep eluded me. Again, at work, all day, I’d be fighting to stay alert, to rein in my dyslexia and spell words correctly.
In the morning light I saw the broken glass and the shattered pane. Someone had thrown a rock at my window, just after I had looked out that window in search of the moon.
I phoned the police. “I’ll make a report,” an officer said. There was no visit. The blasé response was nothing new. A few years back, very close to this spot, it was my head, not the window, that was hit with a large rock. On that occasion, I had unwittingly stumbled between two gangs fighting. I regained consciousness, pushed myself off the sidewalk, and stumbled home through scattering black youths, eager to remove themselves as rapidly as possible from the scene of a downed white woman. I phoned the police. A police officer arrived hours later, spent five minutes in my apartment, and told me with a sneer that I should not be living here. So much for the leftist fantasy that white women assaulted by black men exercise magical power over police.
I wrote to Passaic County Sheriff Richard H. Berdnik about the rock and the window. Debra Wahba, his representative, wrote back “Sheriff Berdnik wanted you to know he has directed our Patrol Officers to give this area extra attention.” There are good reasons, beyond my broken window, to “give this area extra attention.” The block bordering Costello Park is about a tenth of a mile long. In recent years, in this small area, there has been a fatal stabbing, a storeowner shot to death in his shop, a fatal shooting, and an elderly woman raped on the sidewalk. I have, though, seen no enhanced police presence around Costello Park, and the all-night parties continue and have, in recent days, grown louder.
The Lou Costello Memorial Park has been featured in The Sopranos and the 2016 Adam Driver film Paterson. It was created in 1992. The New Jersey Community Development Corporation renovated the park in 2022. The NJCDC spins a sanitized narrative of the park on its webpage. The park, this narrative runs, “fell into disrepair … it became a park that not many people felt comfortable visiting.” The NJCDC saved the park, it wants people to know, by razing a gazebo. Gazebos apparently ruin parks. The NJCDC then took taxpayer money from wealthier towns and erected a playground designed for autistic children. The NJCDC and Paterson’s mayor slapped themselves on the back. They had “improved” this corner of Paterson.
The NJCDC’s narrative is a fantasy. The park did not “fall into disrepair.” The gazebo wasn’t doing anything bad to anyone. It was an attractive, antique structure. Addicts and vagrants slept in the gazebo. Police could have removed them. Crippled by leftist ideology, they did not. So the attractive structure needed to be removed. Wealthier, better-run towns, with conservative local governments, do have gazebos. Rockaway, New Jersey’s gazebo hosts a summer concert series.
A few years back, I was trying to prepare a lesson. My concentration was interrupted by the sound of a man screaming and blows being struck. Without even realizing what I was doing, I didn’t consciously register the sounds and I pushed myself to focus on my lesson plan. Then I stopped myself. “What the hell has happened to me, that I try to ignore the sound of someone screaming and the sound of fists hitting a human body?”
I left my lesson planning. I discovered a disheveled black man in Costello Park. He was screaming and punching himself. I began the interior dialogue I have conducted many times. “Do I call the police? Are police the best solution? Am I invading this man’s space? Maybe he doesn’t want police. What he’s doing looks pretty self-destructive to me, but maybe this is how he wants to spend an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. Don’t the police have more important matters to attend to? Maybe this behavior will stop momentarily.”
I asked myself these same questions many times: when I saw a teenage boy beat a teenage girl and tear off her shirt and bra, in the middle of the street, leaving her naked to the waist. Both seemed equally aggressive. Did either really want police? When I saw a barefoot woman wobbling in the middle of an active commuter road at rush hour. The many times I passed a man standing, staring into space, and I asked, “Are you okay? Do you want me to call someone? Do you need help?” and the man couldn’t answer. All of the people in the above encounters have been black. Would a white police officer make these vulnerable people tense and would things spiral downward?
One of my students, a leftist, once went on a rant about the vagrants in Costello Park. “Doesn’t anyone see them? Doesn’t anyone care? Our society is so callous!” Surrounding listeners applauded her for her “compassion.”
I had no patience for her tired charade. “Open your eyes,” I said, no doubt sounding harsh. “Don’t you see the Salvation Army across the street from Costello Park? Don’t you see Eva’s Village, founded by a Catholic priest? Don’t you see the visitors from the mostly white, suburban evangelical church who visit the park regularly, offering food and aid, the government aid agencies dispensing taxpayer funded food, housing, health care? It’s not, quote, society, unquote, that doesn’t care about these men. It’s these men who don’t care about themselves or about you or me. If they cared about themselves or about us would they refuse the aid offered them? Would they be leaving discarded needles and emptied liquor bottles on the very sidewalks kids walk to get to Paterson school number two?”
The emptied liquor bottles from the all-night parties really get me. Multiple trash cans are conveniently placed in and around the park. An empty Courvoisier bottle can’t weigh that much. The partiers can carry a full Courvoisier bottle to a public park, but they can’t carry an empty bottle twenty feet to a trash can. And, no, they don’t just toss the bottles. They place them, upright and empty, on the sidewalk, sidewalks that they know will service dozens of pedestrians. It’s like they want normal people to know, “While you and your kids slept soundly, trying to follow the rules that create a normal, healthy, happy life, I was a hundred feet away, making sure that no matter how much you try to make this neighborhood better, you’ll always live in a slum.” I want to say to these men, “You are so poor, you have to stop drivers in traffic alongside Costello Park to beg for change, you have to urinate and defecate a hundred feet from autistic kids in their special new playground, but you can afford Courvoisier?”
The New Jersey Community Development Corporation lies continue. Costello Park “became a park that not many people felt comfortable visiting.” In fact, before the expensive renovation, there were always “many people” in Costello Park. A cute, petite housewife and mother who takes great joy in decorating her apartment and the surrounding hallway for every holiday was in that park every morning. She had a little fluffball of a dog. Every time I saw that pooch I’d bend down to pet her and she’d flood my face with kisses. On hot summer nights, folks who can’t afford air conditioning would sit around waiting for the temperature to dip one degree. Don Kommit, our Beat-Era-veteran poet, walked past the park to the bodega for his canned soup. Urban kids’ only experience of leaves changing color in fall took place in that park. Thank you to whomever planted the park’s Washington hawthorns.
If the NJCDC really wanted to improve the park, the solution would be right-wing – changing the behavior of antisocial people. But the NJCDC, it goes without saying, did not take that controversial route of addressing antisocial behavior. Rather, it opted for the left-wing solution – an infusion of taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer dollars generated by hardworking people who don’t party all night and who live in wealthier towns; see here.
As part of its renovation, the NJCDC installed a Little Free Library. A Little Free Library is a wooden box placed on a wooden post. There is a glass window. Inside are books, free to anyone who wants them. A Little Free Library can cost about four hundred dollars. Little Free Libraries pride themselves on distributing “books that provide perspectives on racism and social justice; celebrate BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized voices; and incorporate experiences from all identities for all readers.” The Little Free Library in Costello Park was immediately attacked as if it were an invading enemy. Someone smashed the glass, ripped up the free books, and tossed the pages all around the park. Someone smashed the wooden structure to bits, reducing it to nothing but a stump in the ground. See here.
Some naïve soul installed a second Little Free Library in Costello Park. The new Little Free Library was artistically painted. Whoever painted it wanted to make clear that the Little Free Library was meant to help children access free, attractive reading material, like picture books. Dr. Seuss and other beloved children’s book characters were painted on the Little Free Library exterior.
The destroyer wrecked the new, improved Little Free Library almost immediately after it was installed. Again, the glass was smashed, the wood was pried apart, and the books were ripped up and the scattered pages remained in the park for days, no one bothering to discard them in a convenient garbage can. The expensive, newly installed playground for autistic children was littered with pages from Little Free Library books. Taxpayer dollars sucked into Paterson from wealthier towns “renovated” the park, and within days it looked like a garbage dump.
Someone could have installed a cheap surveillance camera in the park, and discovered who was destroying the Little Free Library. That would not be done, of course, for the same reason the vagrants and addicts sleeping in the park would never be removed by police. Antisocial behavior cannot be punished. It can’t even be mentioned. If you mention antisocial behavior, you are a white supremacist, as Merlin will remind you.
The fate of the Little Free Libraries speaks loudly. You can pour all the money you want into dangerous and decaying cities like Paterson. That money, that comes from taxpayers who do follow civilizational guidelines, is stolen and squandered. Until you change the culture of the antisocial residents in cities like Paterson, no amount of money will improve the lives lived in Paterson.
In the nineteen sixties, America, following leftist ideology, decided that there are no standards, and no behavior can be judged as right or wrong. Identities, rather than behavior, were to be judged. Whites bad blacks good. America decided that illegal drug use is glamorous and funny, and those who condemn drug use are reactionary fascists. Now you cannot speak of “addicts;” you must use the Woke term “person with substance abuse disorder,” thus erasing any personal choice or responsibility. America decided that schools should not discipline any kids and especially not black males. Only racists discipline black male students. America decided that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, “love makes a family,” “Tango makes three,” and Heather will not suffer for not having a dad. America decided that “all cops are bastards,” and that Michael Brown was a “gentle giant” who said “Hands up don’t shoot.” A rich white woman living in a comfortable suburb can believe all these delusional, toxic, leftist lies and not suffer. This leftist ideology kills people where I live, and where millions of other Americans live. Leftist ideology doesn’t just kill individuals. Leftist ideology kills entire cities.
The other day I was talking to a Paterson old timer. His parents were impoverished immigrants. They had been mistreated and malnourished. They were not savvy. They came to Paterson, America’s first planned industrial city, a textile hub and manufacturing center, in the hopes of economic advancement. When they first arrived, their neighborhood was like them. It was poor, but it was safe, and clean, and people looked out for each other.
And then, this old timer told me the other day, everything changed. “It wasn’t slow. It was fast. It was like watching a time lapse film of a rose decaying.”
“Tell me,” I said, “what happened.”
“Well, white people got beat up in the streets. You were a white kid walking home from school and they’d just jump you and beat you up. They’d spray paint their neighbors houses. Break windows. Suddenly the streets were full of garbage. Cars stolen or just vandalized. Tires slashed. We knew we had to move. When I look at Paterson today,” his voice was full of emotion, “it breaks my heart. It was poor, but it was nice. If you had garbage on the street in front of your store, the cop would ticket you.”
I’ve heard similar stories many times. The power narrative is that “white flight” was all about white supremacy. After whites left, neighborhoods went downhill slowly but surely, only because of white neglect: no investment, no services, no repairmen. This old timer, and others like him, tell a different story. They didn’t leave because they didn’t like black newcomers. Many were immigrants and had minimal previous contact with black people. They had not inherited a culture of white supremacy. Rather, black newcomers hated white neighbors as their archetypal enemy, the white man, and targeted them for violent crime. Neighborhoods didn’t go downhill after years of neglect. They went downhill rapidly. The neighborhood’s decline was a reflection of culture. A gazebo didn’t suddenly render a park unsafe. Human behavior, fashioned by culture, rendered a park unsafe.
Leftists demonize anyone who says these things, and professional and personal punishment follow. White supremacists read accounts like this and insist that their sick, evil ideology is correct. And most people, who are neither leftists nor white supremacists, don’t care. Paterson’s bullets don’t penetrate their walls. They don’t have to enter into a conversation in which no matter what you say, you risk personal damage.
The leftists and the white supremacists are both wrong. Antisocial behavior is not an expression of genes. It’s an expression of culture. Yes, the individual black people who choose to deal drugs or steal cars are doing something wrong. Everyone, including white people, does bad things. I’ve certainly done bad things. When I did bad things as a child, nuns beat the stuffing out of me, mercilessly, even, sometimes, when I didn’t do anything bad. My parents supported the nuns. I got the message: you do a bad thing, and everyone will descend upon you with punishment, including God himself. There were no excuses for me. My behavior changed.
An individual black kid committing an act of vandalism, like throwing a rock through my window, meets with a different societal response, one that shapes his behavior just as my behavior was shaped when I did bad things. There are larger forces at work, and those larger forces are largely made up of powerful white leftists who insist it is racist to require black people to live up to the same standards as white people.
Behind the young men making sleep impossible with their loud car stereos blaring violent, sadistic, and misogynist lyrics, beyond the man screaming and beating himself in the park, above the wannabe gangstas shooting black kids dead in the street, I see armies of white leftists pushing each behavior.
I see LBJ, wanting to monopolize the “n-word” vote “for two hundred years,” enacting policies that damaged black families, but did ensure that blacks would vote for Democrats. I see smug Stephen Colbert, on his popular late night show, winking and nudging about how cool drug use is. I see teachers’ unions turning American public education into an oxymoron. I see Upper West Side voters choosing candidates who undermine police and refuse to prosecute violent criminals. I see Hollywood and music company executives who want black people to act out their own antisocial fantasies that they would never act out themselves. These entertainment executives profit from peddling images of black men as gangstas and black women as hos. I see the Smithsonian Institution using taxpayer dollars to demonize the very qualities that would rescue my neighbors from wretched lives. Being on time, being polite, believing in God, practicing the scientific method, working hard, are all “white” see the Smithsonian chart here. I see Pagans using my law-abiding, but poor neighbors as human sacrifices for their twisted religious rituals.
I see social media contacts, Merlin, Judy, Jean, Susan, Amanda, Ellen, none of whom live in black neighborhoods, none of whom read black conservatives, attacking anyone who voices any of these truths. When I invited Merlin to watch a video by black conservative Larry Elder, Merlin refused to do so, insisting that he would never expose himself to any ideas promoted by Dennis Prager.
Watch a statistics-dense Prager University presentation by Larry Elder, here. Read an excerpt from the superb book False Black Power by black conservative Jason L. Riley, here. These two black conservatives and other black conservatives like them agree: policies initiated and supported by leftist whites hurt black people.
I don’t just see rich white leftists building an ideological fence around antisocial behavior and rendering it immune to corrective consequences. I also see very good people, productive people who are white and black and brown and trapped in hell because they are poor and leftists have decided that poor, majority minority communities, unlike rich, white communities, will not have any standards or police or law.
Yes, I see black men partying on the street day and night. I also see black women in nurse’s aide uniforms leaving for work before dawn. I see black women dressed up for church on Sunday morning. I see black women driving Paterson’s buses. I saw my own black, female students working hard to do well in college classrooms. Black women aren’t just more likely to be in college; in one study, black females actually responded to perceived racism by improving their eating and exercise habits, while black males did not. I don’t know if anyone has the definitive answer to why there is a shift of “wealth and power” from black males to black females, but we need to look at this and apply whatever women are doing right to men.
One of my neighbors is an Hispanic immigrant. He has a landscaping business. He also has a workshop in a garage where he tinkers after hours. He also has cultivated “waste” ground along Route 80. One day he stopped me and made me take zucchini, celery, and a large bag of tomatoes. He doesn’t even know my name; he just sees me walking past his garden and wanted to do something kind.
Another one of my neighbors is a black woman. She’s a jazz singer. She’s been well-reviewed in the New York Times and the New York Post. She has been invited to sing internationally. She does volunteer work to improve her community. One day she saw me walking and offered me a ride in her very old but serviceable car.
A few of my neighbors are adjunct professors. They teach future generations. Adjuncts make less than minimum wage for the hours that they work. They live in low-rent neighborhoods.
If parents, teachers, and police enforced civilizational guidelines in Paterson, my neighbors who, yes, are poor, but, again, who work hard and play by the rules, would have better lives. The refusal, by those in power, to address antisocial behavior from a minority of the population, or the refusal by those in power who insist on misrepresenting antisocial behavior as something glamorous or revolutionary, betray the Hispanic immigrant who works like a dog, the talented black jazz singer who is well-reviewed and has appeared on Broadway but who can’t earn enough from her art to live in Rockaway, the adjunct professors who work in Wayne but live in Paterson, the housewife with the fluffy dog who loves to decorate, and the innocent kids who couldn’t help being born here and who are just starting out in life.
Sunday, October 1, I really needed to get away. The rock through the window was just one of a series of mini disasters. I’d recently gotten bad news about my health, and stress has been eating me up. I walked to Garret Mountain and saw a fire in the woods. I phoned Paterson police. An operator said that Paterson police would not respond. I needed to be transferred to state police. She put me on hold and eventually hung up on me. I phoned state police. An operator told me that state police would not respond; Paterson police would. She said she’d transfer me. I gave up. I told myself that I can’t fix Paterson police. I told myself that maybe someone else would see and report the fire.
I got home and tried to relax. I began watching a Bollywood romantic comedy; perfect escape fare. And then I heard an all too familiar sound: pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. It’s like fireworks, except there is no shower sound at the end. Someone was just shot, I realized.
“You can’t fix it,” I told myself. “Just ignore it.” And I did. I’m still thinking about that. That I just wanted to ignore someone getting shot to death less than a hundred feet from me.
My ability to ignore the drive-by shooting that took place outside my window was limited. I eventually gave up on retreating into the Bollywood rom-com and joined my neighbors in the street. We saw what you see after a shooting. Yellow tape, many police officers, one of whom was placing white markers near where bullets were found. Mary Taylor was a 22-year-old woman. Accounts say that she was an “innocent bystander.” This strikes me as an odd way to put it. Gunning people down in the street does not strike me as an appropriate way to end any human life. Of course she was an innocent bystander. The gunman, according to reports, was wearing a ski mask and driving a stolen car. As of this writing, he is still at large.
It would be another night when it would be difficult to sleep.
In 2022, after honor student and Paterson resident Robert Cuadra was shot to death while helping his grandmother carry groceries into her home, I wished I could write an essay about Robert that would make people care about him. That would make his name as famous as that of George Floyd. That would rouse America into addressing the factors that contributed to his death.
I now wish I could say anything worthy about Mary Taylor, whose death I heard as I was trying to escape into a romantic comedy. She was my neighbor. No doubt we crossed paths many times, but I didn’t know her. All I can tell you is her name, her age, how it sounded when she was shot to death, and what the pavement looked like after her body was carried away.
I wish black celebrities with powerhouse resources, I’m thinking Beyonce, Christian Cooper, Denzel Washington, Lebron James, and Barack Obama, read about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, and other research like it. I wish they would mount a project that would have an equal and opposite impact as LBJ had on the black family. Children who grow up with a biological father in the home are less likely to end up in jail. Period. End of sentence. You’ve got that information; now apply it in the real world. The late, great black conservative, Walter E. Williams, stressed the inescapable issue of the black family again and again. See here, here, and here.
Second wish: broken windows policing. Read more about broken windows policing here. Given previous criminal activity, major and minor, Mayor Andre Sayegh and police had every reason to know that this one-tenth-mile stretch of Paterson, NJ, would soon be the site of another drive-by shooting. If they had practiced broken windows policing, one 22 year old woman might still be alive.
Mayor Sayegh’s approach is different. “I am bringing taxpayer money into Paterson,” Mayor Sayegh boasts. “So what?” many Patersonians ask. “So what if you siphon money from richer towns into this poor city? The streets are still full of garbage. Crime is still rampant. Schools are still failing students.” “Paterson NJ Public Schools Are Falling Apart Despite $500 Million from State,” and “Paterson NJ High School Graduation Scores Fall Short,” are a couple of recent headlines. “Almost 90% of the city’s students failed math … while more than 60% flunked language arts,” Reported the Bergen Record in August, 2023. Because Paterson students do so poorly, a leftist solution was attempted: standards were lowered to make it easier for Paterson students to graduate. In spite of this leftist lowering of standards, “the academic performance gap between Paterson students and their counterparts from the rest of New Jersey grew larger in the past year.”
On his Facebook page, Mayor Sayegh, who seems to be a very nice guy and dedicated to his job, boasted of yet another project bringing money into Paterson. Romeo Habibi, who self-identifies as a dishwasher, commented, “You can change the city look but you can’t change the people mentality what’s the point of building and we can’t walk safe with our kids or smelling drugs” [sic].
Mary Taylor was murdered a third of a mile from the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park. As North Jersey dot com put it, “Mayor Andre Sayegh hopes to make” the Paterson Falls Park “the centerpiece of Paterson’s revival.” The money poured into the Falls Park is like the money poured into Costello Park. Until someone in power addresses the culture, there will be no “revival” of Paterson. The press reports that the murder of Mary Taylor “was across the street from Costello Park, where the mayor held about a half dozen press conference in recent years to highlight a $1 million recreation renovation project,” and also near other investment sites that the mayor boosted. “David Soo, head of the tenants association of an apartment building across the street from where the woman was shot … took issue with the mayor’s social media videos highlighting what Sayegh calls his accomplishments in Paterson. Soo said the mayor’s videos send ‘a clear message that playing make-believe is more important than the people of Paterson.'”
Criminals, even in Paterson, are the minority. The rest of us are poor, but we are normal. We are a housewife and mother who loves to decorate for the holidays. We are poets and adjunct professors. We are honor students looking forward to benefitting from a scholarship. We are 22-year-old women just starting out in life. We obey the law; we don’t take drugs; we yearn for normalcy. A normalcy we could only experience in a world where kids are brought up by both biological parents, where the state does not undermine the family, where teachers are allowed to set and enforce standards, where cops are, as they always will be, imperfect, but respected for the necessary work they do.
Mary Taylor, 22 years old, was one of us. Though I certainly passed Mary many times, I know nothing about her except this: she was a human being. Her life mattered. Her death matters. She deserved better. And here I am, saying her name.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
This local crime story deserves national attention, anger, and action
Sabir Jones, a 39-year-old “homeless” man from Newark walked, into the busy Fifth Avenue/53rd Street station in midtown Manhattan around noon on October 18. Without provocation, Jones approached a 26-year-old man getting off an E train. Jones punched him in the face, breaking his jaw. Jones then walked up to an unsuspecting 30-year-old woman who had stepped off an F train. He violently shoved her head into the side of the departing train and she tumbled onto the tracks. Passersby jumped down to get her out before another train arrived. She was rushed to a nearby hospital where she underwent emergency brain surgery. A “a significant portion” of her skull was removed. Even if she survives, she will never again have a normal life.
Jones was quickly identified because he was “known to” police. He was arrested in Newark the following day.
Last July, Jones punched a random 65-year-old woman twice in the back at another busy station. A few months earlier, Jones was “connected” to an incident involving threats to a business in the Lower East Side. Jones also had two “emotionally disturbed person” incidents there. Last December, Jones was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest when he refused to stop riding between subway cars on a J train in Brooklyn.
Jones also had at least 40 criminal cases on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River during the past 12 years. Those charges included aggravated assault, terroristic threats, theft, forgery, weapons possession, drug, assault, and sex crimes. In July of 2021, three domestic violence charges were brought against him. Jones had been “homeless” and living in streets and subway stations for roughly six years.
If this story promoted a “progressive” or “woke” political agenda, it would have been national headline news for days, if not weeks. There would have been detailed interviews of his victims and their families.
Politicians, law enforcement, and health professionals would have been identified, shamed, and held accountable for their failure to protect the public.
And why did Sabir Jones have such resentment and hatred for people he did not know? If Jones were White, and his two victims Black, the media would have searched for and reported a possible racial motive. They would have checked his social media and interviewed friends and neighbors. However, Sabir Jones is Black. We only know that because police briefly shared his photo with the public when they were looking for him. The media did not report the race of his two victims who are White.
Crime stories like this cry out for public attention, anger, and action. However, if they do not involve a gun or racism by “white supremacists” or “right-wing extremists,” they are rarely reported as national news. That is because these stories do not promote a “woke” narrative that helps Democrats win elections.
That is why this crime story was reported only in local New York media, and only for two days. I learned of it only because I was driving into the city for a wedding on the day Jones was arrested.
So far, I have seen no follow-up coverage. It seems as if none of the politicians, law-enforcement and health professionals who let this happen will ever be questioned or held accountable. No laws or policies will be changed.
It also appears that we will never learn what caused Sabir Jones to have such uncontrolled resentment, rage, and hatred.
In 2015, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine random people in Charleston, South Carolina. He chose them because they were Black. That one crime resulted in years of research to identify the “historical racism” that caused his hate. There were national campaigns to remove Confederate flags at cemeteries and old statues at parks that nobody had noticed for years.
In December of 2012, the movie Django Unchained was released to American theaters. Its fake history promoted hatred of whites the way the Birth of a Nation in 1915 promoted hatred of blacks and the way the 1940 Nazi film Jew Süss promoted hatred of Jews in Europe.
Did Sabir Jones ever see the movie Django Unchained? Was he taught similar hatred in public school the media or other Hollywood or TV entertainment? If so, did they influence him? Are law enforcement and health professionals asking those questions?
If we never question the cause of this hatred, we will never understand how to stop it. How many more lives must be lost or ruined before we act?
Image: Pexels
