Awww!
9-year-old Zianna Oliphant spoke at a Charlotte City Council meeting about race, police violence, and reform. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and, of course, the video “went viral.” She has kept talking, expert on urban governance and law enforcement that she is, since she earned her fifteen minutes of fame. “I was just feeling like what the police are doing to us, just because of our skin, is not right,” the fourth-grader told NBC.
Of course, she knows absolutely nothing about the issues involved. She has no idea whether what happened to Keith Lamont Scott was ” done to us, just because of our skin” or done to him, because he threatened a police officer. (It was done to him, by a black cop, who, if he was doing it because of the color of Zianna’s skin needs to be put on a suicide watch.)
All Zianna knows is what she has been taught, and based on what she said, she has been indoctrinated by her family and community into be a police-fearing, anti-white racist. Now that this is happening to the black children of Charlotte and elsewhere is important information that should be part of the discussion, but that’s not how her statements are being used. She is being exploited by adults who know that their opinions become more persuasive coming out of the mouths of babes, and she is being accorded undeserved moral authority because she is young and innocent. Zianna also has a fourth grade education and maybe six years of life experience. Wow.
What can such an individual contribute to a public policy debate so complex that elected officials, scholars and public policy experts don’t know how to proceed? Nothing. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. A nine year-old girl, even the most brilliant nine-year-old girl who has ever lived, is useless. A City Council that would waste deliberation and consideration of critical issues on the testimony of children, however moving, should just hand in their resignations en masse. They are incompetent and a disgrace.
In the alternative, Charlotte should give voting privileges to anyone over the age of five. Maybe they will.
Oh, I have no doubt that Zianna can speak effectively for the likes of Black Lives Matter, Ti-Nahist Coates, Marilyn Mosby and Colin Kaepernick (who, naturally, is a fan, his own opinions being as about as grounded in logic, study and experience as hers), who simplify the issue of police shootings to “any time a police officer shoots a black citizen, he or she is preemptively a racist and a murderer, and is doing the bidding of a white society dedicated to oppressing blacks.” I can easily excuse a nine-year-old for holding such a destructive and false opinion, since she might also believe in Santa Claus. I cannot forgive elected officials who give nine-year-olds a place in public deliberations over a controversy that is getting people–demonstrators, suspects, police officers, innocent citizens—killed.
Has anyone considered that the reason Charlotte is in turmoil is because its leaders are willing to take advice from fourth graders? They need to.
Meanwhile, it is increasingly looking as if these riots and subsequent violence, as in Ferguson, were created by a false narrative eagerly accepted and publicized by the news media and activists eager to use it for their own purposes. Keith Lamont Scott was not the quiet, book-loving victim he was portrayed as by his wife, and his wife knew it. She had a restraining order filed against him a year ago when he threatened to kill her and her son with that gun that she and the NAACP claim he wasn’t carrying.
Wait–let’s ask Zianna what she thinks about domestic abuse and whether it reflects on an individual’s tendency to engage in violence. Wise Zianna, do wives who refuse to file charges against violent spouses share any responsibility when those spouses threaten others? Please, Zianna, what is your analysis of the role of black families in perpetuating the high rate of African American interaction with the law enforcement system? All-knowing Zianna, how should police officers balance their duty to protect the community with their personal interest in not being vilified as racists in the news media, while also protecting their own lives when threatened? Enlighten us with your own extensive experience!
As constantly whining soldier Bill Paxton says in “Aliens,” after being informed that a little girl survived the drooling monsters for months, “Why don’t you put her in charge, man?”
Yeah, why don’t they? She couldn’t do any worse than Chalotte’s current city leaders.
Ethics Alarms 
This also verges on child abuse. Prepping a kid and then wheeling them out into the public eye. What if she had forgotten her lines or been stage struck? Someone on the council or a sergeant at arms or someone should have said, “This isn’t appropriate,” and stopped her from getting to the microphone. Tons of muffled ethics alarms in the family and in that room.
This seems to have become a standard trick these days. Remember the cute little seven year old boy that was trotted out in Chicago to complain about school closings? Maybe this is something from the Saul Alinsky playbook.
And of course, Mr. Scott’s priors have nothing to do with what happened when he was murdered by systemic racism. Nothing. How could you think such a thing, Mr. Marshall, or suggest it?
Those wacky politicians. Didn’t they realize Matthew 8:13 was a metaphor? 🙂
This is nothing new. I remember, and I’m sure Jack remembers when a fifth grader named Samantha Smith, from an obscure town in Maine, wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov asking how the Soviets were going to avoid having a war with the US, and became some shining symbol of peace and reconciliation. To this day there are folks who think her death in a plane crash at the age of 13 was engineered by the Reagan administration because she had the potential to derail the Cold War.
The all-wise empress with the body of a child wasn’t all that great of an idea in The Neverending Story, and it’s ridiculous in real life. Those who let themselves be swayed by the words of a child who is still jumping rope to silly rhymes and playing hopscotch are intellectually lazy and emotionally immature.
Maybe Zianna here needs to have a word with California Attorney General Kamala Harris.
http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_25243849/concealed-carry-gun-law-california-appealed-kamala-harris
“Local law enforcement must be able to use their discretion to determine who can carry a concealed weapon”- Kamala Harris
Juxtapose that quote with this.
“I was just feeling like what the police are doing to us, just because of our skin, is not right,”
Did anyone from the Black Lies matter movement confront Harris on her words?
Are you ever going to provide any evidence that there is racial bias in the process of deciding who gets concealed carry licenses, or are you just going to repeat it forever and ever?
If the criminal justice system is racist, and if we need to depend on and expand background checks that rely on information we get from the criminal justice system, then…
That’s assuming you believe both of those things to be true.
I’ve never understood why the people so sure the criminal justice system is racist are often the same people who want to expand their control over our rights. Well, that’s not true, I understand it, I just think it tips their hand on how they feel about the second amendment (that it shouldn’t be a right.)
He’s merely exposing distance in the left’s much crowed positions:
1) police are racist towards blacks and shouldn’t be trusted to treat the citizenry equally.
2) police can be trusted to make decisions on limiting citizens rights, such as the 2nd amendment.
Or as Emily had to embarrassingly explain to you.
Dissonance not distance.
It is of course theoretically possible that law enforcement officials are employing racial bias in deciding who gets a concealed carry permit. But I asked for evidence, not theoretical possibility.
It would be a phenomenal thing for the same police you and others here openly decry discriminatory practices and racism to be so perfectly compartmentalized they can shut off their systematic racism in order to fairly distribute conceal carry permits.
He doesn’t need to prove anything. He’s just demonstrating your camp’s unwillingness to be consistent.
Evidence: Take the evidence that’s shown of systemic racism– blacks or other people of color being profiled, charged, and convicted in greater numbers as compared to whites even with comparable criminal histories and area crime rates.
Now all of those people who are convicted — and in some cases like domestic violence or terrorist watch lists people are advocating for just charged — know full well that a background check isn’t going to allow them to get a license, so few of them are going to apply and those who do will be turned down according to the “fair” enactment of the law.
And, as the numbers show, there will be more of them who are people of color than white people.
The evidence of bias in the system (if you accept that evidence) makes it impossible for there not to be bias in granting concealed carry licenses under most current laws.
“blacks or other people of color being profiled, charged, and convicted in greater numbers as compared to whites” is not proof of any bias whatsoever. If blacks perform a disproportionate number of crimes, and the evidence is that they do, then profiling is not unreasonable, just unfair to the non-criminals and hence intolerable.. Blacks over-whelmingly lead whites in single parent households. Is this proof that marriage as an institution is systemically racist? That’s the answer only if the conclusion that black culture is considerably responsible for this plight is eliminated from the options.
Systemic racism is an easy excuse. The other explanations require some accountability and self-criticism.
Totally agree, I’m just saying that *if* you feels there’s evidence that the system is biased in prosecution of crimes, then you must also admit that there will be bias in second amendment rights as a result, based on the way our laws are written.
You can believe that it’s *not* biased in prosecution and is still biased in second amendment rights, which would require different evidence. You can also believe there’s no bias in either.
But it defies logic to believe there’s evidence of bias in prosecution and *not* of any effect on second amendment rights, since our laws explicitly allow for limiting second amendment rights based on prosecutions. Yet liberals who *do* believe that the former bias is fact usually ignore one of the obvious results (based on their own belifes) when they call for harsher gun control.
I’m not arguing for systemic racism, that’s a different subject. I’m just pointing out the internal inconsistency in other people’s arguments.
This is truly despicable when a kid of this age is used to stir up more anger about “killer cops” and further the BLM agenda. The parents of this girl should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen. However, my guess is they’re not. I put this on that same level as Southern parents in the past who taught their kids that blacks were untrustworthy, lazy and generally ignorant.
For all the rhetoric about protecting children, there certainly seems to be a widespread effort to afford their opinions the same weight that life experience and education does for adults.
From the child who says he’s always wanted to be an actor (Paul Petersen nicely dissects how a child comes to believe he’s “always” wanted to act) to the 6-year old whose parents immediately let her change her name, hairstyle and clothing the second she decides she’s really a boy instead of a girl, the world seems eager to rush kids into making life-affecting decisions and push them into adult roles, especially if a particular agenda is promoted in the process.
There’s a reason an age of consent for sexual activity and a minimum age to drive a car, join the armed forces, vote or sign a legal contract exist. Most young people do not have the ability to process the long-term consequences of such important decisions or to recognize when they are being exploited. Heck, “To Catch a Predator”, “What Would You Do?” and other such programs make their dollars showing how easily children can be manipulated by an adult with an agenda.
Despite that, kids are regularly put behind the controls of planes, following sherpas up Mt. Everest, spending a few years of their lives on a bike seat, being photographed with the President while he’s on his latest anti-gun crusade or letting the entire world watch while their childhoods are spent in front of a TV camera after Mom & Dad had sufficient numbers of them to attract TLC…all because some adult with an ulterior motive wants us to believe the children are following their dreams or making a difference in the lives of others.
Zianna has been told that police officers are out hunting and murdering black people solely because of their skin color. She’s being fed the doctrine that African-Americans are perpetual victims who will never be able to get ahead in life because white people want them dead. She isn’t old enough to realize she’s being used to promote a false narrative that is far more destructive to African-American psyches than a handful of questionable shootings ever will be.
Why on Earth are you bothered by a change of hairstyle and clothing? Hair grows back, clothes are just cloth, it’s not like we’re talking about anything revealing that over sexualizes a child right? No stiletto heels or tube tops or the like. We are talking about pants and shirt are we not? I wore pants as a child and whether or not you think I’m messed up, I’m sure you’ll agree it wasn’t my blue jeans that did it.
Hey valkygrrl!
My intent was not to disparage little girls who wear shorts, jeans and t-shirts instead of dresses or who get their hair cut in the typical childhood fashion. Nor was it a comment on sexualized kids. I’m sorry that my phrasing was clumsy.
Nor was it an attempt to debate transgenderism. It was really just a comment on how some parents who would never let a young child decide she’s able to drive are quick to make their 6-year old daughter look like a boy and be called by a boy’s name just because she thinks she is one.
The child is too young and inexperienced to make that kind of life-altering choice. But some parents rush into it anyway.
I agree that a six year-old is too young to make a permanent life-altering choice.
I don’t think a hair and clothing change is a life-altering choice, though it is a sad state of affairs that society is pushing gender norms that early.
Exactly. God knows what I wanted to wear when I was six…back in the ’70s when polyester pants and turtlenecks were the norm, but I don’t think anything I could have chosen would have been much worse!
At six I always wanted to wear a cape so I could fly.*
*It was influence from the Greatest American Hero, a cape gives the power of flight, at least to a six year old mind.
“Nor was it an attempt to debate transgenderism. It was really just a comment on how some parents who would never let a young child decide she’s able to drive are quick to make their 6-year old daughter look like a boy and be called by a boy’s name just because she thinks she is one.”
I don’t think that’s a very good analogy. Driving is inherently dangerous. Expressing a certain gender identity isn’t. (The danger comes from violent transphobes.)
Kids who are “expressing a [wrong] gender identity” are in fact being manipulated by their parents, and typically pretty overtly so, and for obvious reasons. And it is dangerous…to the kids.
Kids who are “expressing a [wrong] gender identity” are in fact being manipulated by their parents, and typically pretty overtly so, and for obvious reasons. And it is dangerous…to the kids.
Isaac, your comment is so vague that it could be read as either extreme anti-trans propaganda or extreme pro-trans propaganda.
Which did you intend it as?
Bull. Trans people like to think they’re special snowflakes and the world is full of trans phobia, but those violent encounters tend to come from homophobes who don’t make a distinction.
For once I agree. Trans, Intersex, Gay , they make no such fine distinctions. And while it can be based on ID documentation, often it’s based on appearance. Plenty of straight cis women have been victimised because some cretin mistook them for Trans. Just like some Sikhs get mistaken by ignorant bigots as Muslims.
What? If a cis woman is beaten up because the attacker thinks they’re trans, that’s transphobia. Obviously. Of course there is a lot of overlap with homophobia, but how on earth does that imply that transphobia doesn’t exist?
Zoe answered. To make it transphobia they’d have to distinguish between gay and trans, they don’t.
To put it crudely, to them trans is just another kind of faggot or dyke so they say ‘hey look how bold the queers are gettin’ and then grab a tire iron.
“Zoe answered. To make it transphobia they’d have to distinguish between gay and trans, they don’t.”
That’s absurd. There are people out there who have attacked people who simply *look* Arab, thinking they are Muslim. They don’t distinguish between Arabs and Muslims. Are these people acting out of racism or Islamophobia? The answer is both.
There are people out there who have attacked Mexican-Americans, thinking they are illegal immigrants who are taking their jobs. They don’t distinguish between Mexican-Americans and illegal immigrants. Are these people acting out of racism or xenophobia? The answer is both.
There are people out there who have attack cis lesbian women, thinking they are trans. They don’t distinguish between gay and trans. Are these people acting out of homophobia or transphobia? The answer is both.
I don’t see why anyone would argue otherwise, unless they’re actively trying to downplay one of these things and pretend it’s not a real problem.
As someone who thinks police brutality against the black community is a problem–this is child exploitation, and wrong.
Zianna was just accepted to Harvard Law School for immediate enrollment.
A few months ago, I had a knock on my front door from a Bernie supporter who had a (looked under 12 years old) child with her, helping her campaign. I didn’t say anything, because it might have been her child and she had no one else to watch her, but after they left, the more I thought about it, the more I was frustrated by the situation. It sure seemed she expected the child to soften my heart to her message. It struck me as manipulative and cruel to both child and people she met.
Parents holding signs asking for money in parking lots often prop their preteen kids up next to them with signs too. It must work.
In other news, nine-year old Zach Johnson declares “The Phantom Menace is the bestest movie ever.” The Academy is already discussing belatedly giving George Lucas an Oscar.
That’s really mean. Don’t pick on the child and accuse her of liking really bad movies just because her mother put her in the spotlight.
She’s 9 years-old, lay off.
The Phantom Menace was my favorite movie as a 9-year-old.
Nothing the matter with that. I thought Jerry Lewis movies were hilarious when I was 8. Roy Rogers’ show seemed terrific and sophisticated then too: I especially thought Pat Brady was funny. It was shock to discover decades later that he was an unforgivable hack.
I used to love Hee-Haw, you know, since we’re all confessing to things.