Race

Columnist Malpractice On The Tamir Rice Tragedy

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
This is not how police saw Tamir Rice before he was shot, but never mind: the points is to horrify the public, not to accurately explain what happened.

This is not how police saw Tamir Rice before he was shot, but never mind: the objective is to inflame public opinion, not to accurately convey what happened and why.

Washington Post reporter Lonnae O’Neal found herself compelled by the Tamir Rice grand jury decision to write the kind of irresponsible column for the paper that can be written but shouldn’t be written—not by a professional journalist, not when public passions are inflamed, not when complex and entangled issues need analysis, careful words, perspective and wisdom. It is an emotional scream of pain and frustration, unleavened by objectivity, fairness or restraint. Such columns do much damage, and no good. Such columns are destructive. I hope writing it relieved her pain, but that’s not justification enough.

I was alerted to the kind of column it would be  by its first sentences:

A 12-year-old black boy walks into a Cleveland park, plays with a toy gun and, within seconds of arriving, a police officer shoots him dead. His partner tackles the boy’s 14-year-old sister as she rushes to his side, handcuffs the girl and shoves her into a squad car, helpless, as her brother lay dying.

If we want to accurately describe the event that ended  Tamir Rice’s life so prematurely from the perspective of people who loved him, and of people mourning the senseless death of a child, those who read about the boy’s death and want to cry to the skies, “Why? How can this happen?,” then that is a defensible beginning….maybe.  That is not her intent, however. The intent of her column is to indict “the system” for not indicting the officer who shot Tamir Rice. With that intent, the description is a lie, a manipulative appeal to pure emotion that willfully and negligently makes the system, which is not and must not be based on emotion, incomprehensible.  Continue reading →

Dear BlackLivesMatter And Friends: If You Won’t Be Responsible, At Least Leave LeBron James Alone

/ Jack Marshall / 84 Comments

No Justice LeBron

It should be apparent by now that BlackLivesMatter is a racist domestic terrorist organization. Terrorism is causing chaos for the sake of causing chaos in the imagined pursuit of a political agenda. That’s what the group, smug and shameless as ever, did over the post-Christmas weekend, disrupting the Mall of the Americas and blocking traffic at the Minneapolis airport. No, they haven’t killed anyone yet; they claim to be non-violent. We’ll see about that when they get sufficiently frustrated. One thing is certain about irrational, self-glorifying organizations: you never know how irrational they will get.

Now the Tamir Rice mess in Cleveland has presented BLM and its allies—which include all three Democratic candidates for President, according to their pandering rhetoric, as well as the Democratic National Committee— with a target more relevant to their alleged mission than disrupting children’s choir performances, losing money for small businesses and inconveniencing  Minnesotans who never did an African American harm in their lives. Using the hashtag #NoJusticeNoLebron, the Ferguson activated activists, led by writer Tariq Touré, have launched a Twitter barrage  imploring NBA superstar and Cleveland Cavaliers hometown hero LeBron James to refuse to play in NBA games until the Department of Justice, “imprisons the murderers of Tamir Rice.” Justice is of course investigating the fatal November 2014 shooting, since the Obama Administration tacitly encourages the divisive myth that any time a  white officer shoots a black man, it is presumptively a civil rights violation.

Like virtually everything that has come out of the incoherent, anti-white, anti-police movement surrounding the various controversial police shootings (of blacks only, however, though there have been more fatal shootings of whites…but never mind, that doesn’t advance the mythical narrative), this plan is ludicrous, unfair, and demonstrates the ignorance and/or contempt the protesters have for due process and the rule of law. Continue reading →

The Tamir Rice Fiasco And “Ethics Zugzwang”

/ Jack Marshall / 79 Comments

Gun comparison

There are circumstances in which all ethical options have been eliminated by poor choices and bad luck. Henceforth Ethics Alarms will refer to this dilemma as ethics zugzwang, zugzwang being a chess term for the situation where a player must make a move, and any move will worsen his position.

By the time the killing of Tamir Rice got to the grand jury, it was ethics zugzwang. The grand jury’s decision not to charge the two officers involved is troubling, and a decision to charge would have also been troubling. To get anything out of this utter and fatal fiasco, a lot has to change, and we have to recognize what in order to make those changes occur. It won’t be easy. I think it may be impossible.

There is no way that the justice system can do its job objectively and well when every police shooting involving a black victim is instantly labelled racist and murder by vocal activists, pundits and and social media, with the implied threat of civil unrest. If an indictment is handed down as in theFreddie Gray matter in Baltimore, it appears as if mob passions are manipulating the system, and, in the Gray case, it was. Such a result, in turn, makes it more difficult for the next accused cop to get justice. It estranges the police force from the government entity it serves, and makes police wary and less likely to assume the risks associated with their vital and inherently dangerous  job.

These considerations create their own impetus making a failure to indict more likely. A city cannot afford to be seen as not supporting the police, even when they make a deadly mistake in judgment. District attorneys are on the same team as police, and automatically share their perspective; it is important that the police recognize that. The police receive the benefit of every doubt, and the deserve that. Yet a failure to indict, especially now that police shootings have become high profile matters that every blogger and pundit prejudges according to their own biases and agendas, will inevitably be used to indict the system instead. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Washington Post’s Fatal Police Shootings Study

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

policeshootings

The Washington Post just released its own study of 2015 police shootings, including statistics that that the FBI, which admitted to the Post that it has not done a thorough job of tracking the data, has missed. Writes the Post:

The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty in 2015. The Post is tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, and whether the person was armed — by culling local news reports and monitoring independent databases such as Killed by Police and Fatal Encounters. In some cases, The Post conducted additional reporting. The Post is documenting only shootings in which a police officer, while on duty, shot and killed a civilian — circumstances that most closely parallel the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. The Post is not tracking deaths of people in custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or deaths in which police gunfire did not kill the individual.

The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete.The Post’s database will be updated regularly as new fatal shootings are reported and as new facts emerge about individual cases. The Post is seeking assistance in making the database as comprehensive as possible. To provide information about fatal police shootings in 2015, send us an e-mail at policeshootingsfeedback@washpost.com. The Post is also interested in obtaining photos of the deceased and original videos of fatal encounters with police.

Elsewhere, the Post makes it clear that “incomplete” hardly begins to describe the FBI’s negligence:

The landscape of police shootings is surprisingly thinly explored. The FBI is charged with keeping statistics on such shootings, but a Post analysis of FBI data showed that fewer than half of the nation’s 18,000 police departments report their incidents to the agency.The Post documented well more than twice as many fatal shootings this year as the average annual tally reported by the FBI over the past decade. The FBI and the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics now acknowledge that their data collection has been deeply flawed. FBI Director James B. Comey called his agency’s database “unacceptable.” Both agencies have launched efforts to create new systems for documenting fatalities.

Observations: Continue reading →

Dear Linda: There Is Nothing Racist, Biased, Disrespectful, Harmful, Wrong Or Unethical About This Drawing. Get Help. Quickly. And Not To Lay A Guilt Trip On You Or Anything, But It’s People Like You Who Make Donald Trump Popular

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

office party

The Washington Post recently accompanied a feature about office Christmas parties with the above illustration. Sharp-eyed reader Linda Franklin thuse felt that she had to lambaste the paper for its diversity blindness in today’s “Free For All” extension to the usual Letters to the Editor section. Admittedly, “Free For All” is where the Post stows its pedants and cranks. There was a letter today complaining that a penguin story had a photo of the wrong species of penguin. Another guy, who just missed having a post written here about him, chided the Post for letting “global-warming deniers” off as  being called mere “skeptics,” because according to Skeptical Inquirer magazine,  “skeptic is an honored term that should be reserved for those who are guided by scientific evidence,” and the Associated Press “will no longer use the term skeptics for those who reject the findings of climate science.” That’s right, you ass, tar with the equivalent of Holocaust denial those who reasonably and properly cry foul at those who claim certainty in the notoriously speculative climate science field and who don’t believe current research on the subject justifies such nonsensical and self-destructive policy decisions as blocking the Keystone Pipeline.

But I digress. Franklin’s letter is a societal warning that the obsession with group identification, quotas and diversity can lead to societal insanity. in other words, Linda is contagious.

“There was a significant fault in the illustration accompanying “Significant bother,” Linda began.

Having seen the drawing and immediately gone to work with her abacus, she determined that that 20 people who have some skin color indicated (on their faces, hands or back of their necks) and four in the foreground who are bluish. (“That’s funny, they don’t look Bluish!” I thought that joke was funny when I saw “Yellow Submarine,” and I still do. No, I never grew up. Linda, I’m sure, thinks this means I’m an anti-Semite.) Of the 24 people who are meant to be at an office party, she calculated, “only two men are obviously African American, one blue woman might be African-American, one woman is probably Asian and one person has gray hair.”

Linda is outraged, and probably wrote her missive with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Is this really a fair way to depict the employees of an office?” she cries. Continue reading →

A Merry Christmas For The Washington Redskins, “The Slants,” And The First Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Yes, The Slants were apparently, disparaging. themselves.

Yes, The Slants were apparently disparaging. themselves.

The political-correctness obsessed Democratic component of our government has decided that forcing Dan Snyder to change the name of his football team due to its alleged offensiveness to people who don’t care about football is a legitimate government function, or so they would have us believe. Actually, they believe it is a legitimate political function to lick the moccasins of progressive activist groups who thrive on opportunities to tell others what they can safely say.

After Senate Democrats signed an unethical  missive threatening the Washington Redskins if the team wasn’t renamed something that an enterprising race-baiter wouldn’t find offensive—not as easy as it may seem— the Patent and Trademark Office canceled the registration of “Redskins” using the excuse that Federal trademark law excludes the registration of “scandalous, immoral, or disparaging marks” as well as trademarks that a “substantial composite of the referenced group” perceives as disparaging to a religion, nation, ethnic group, or  belief system. [ You can read my opinion on this ruling here. I’d quote from it, but it’s Christmas Eve.]

The ruling was upheld in the Fourth Circuit, despite the fact that it seem to be fairly blatant viewpoint-based restriction of speech, or in other words, unconstitutional. To his credit, Snyder is not allowing the Democrats to bully him or illegally try to control his speech either, and has the resources to fight. The betting is that the Supreme Court will tell the Trademark Office to stop playing politics.

The Patent and Trademark Office also barred the registration of “The Slants,” the trademarked name of Simon Tam’s Asian-American band. Now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit just held, in the case of In re Tam, by a 9-to-3 vote, that this exclusion of “disparaging” trademarks, and, by extension, the Redskins ban as well, violates the First Amendment.  This means that the Redskins case is likely to go to the Supreme Court if the government doesn’t agree to let people trademark whatever the want to, regardless of who or what it might “disparage.” Continue reading →

The Social Justice Talking Points Placemat: Harvard Finally Snaps

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

placemat

You will note that I have effectively resisted the temptation to excessively mock Yale for its embarrassing anti-free speech assaults, racial spoils games and political correctness bullying outbreak. Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown have also been disgraced by their students, faculty and administrators of late, but among the Ivies, my family’s favorite university (my parents even met and fell in love in The Yaahd) has pretty much avoided major humiliation, though the Law School had a silly dust-up over its seal and there is an ongoing controversy over black tape. I knew that if their other elite institutional colleagues were going nuts, it was only a matter of time before Harvard joined the loony parade, and sure enough, Harvard has a float.

In some ways, it’s worse than anything its rivals have come up with yet.

This sounds like an Onion parody, or maybe a stunt by the Harvard Lampoon. I’m still hoping it is: the Lampoon of old would do things like this. Harvard’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (Wait:  Harvard really has such an office? ARRRRRGHH!) distributed what it calls “Holiday Placemats for Social Justice” (How can anyone say that with a straight face? PLEASE let this be a Lampoon hoax!) to the freshman dining hall and a few upper class dining rooms to guide students through political and social policy conversations when they return home for Christmas break. (Does this remind you of the Obama administration’s directives to good little progressives about pushing Obamacare over the holidays? This is now the progressive way.)

The placemat presents talking points ( I still can’t believe I’m writing this) for students having discussions about controversial topics such as “Black Murders in the Street,” “House Master Title,” and “Islamophobia/Refugees.”

You know, when I was student, I guarantee such an insulting attempt at indoctrination would lead to a bonfire. Continue reading →

Mistrial In The First Freddie Gray Trial: There’s No Way Out Of This Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Judge Declares Mistrial In First Freddie Gray Trial

In Baltimore this week, a judge declared a mistrial in the case of Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter after jurors said they were deadlocked regarding all of the charges against him in the death of Freddie Gray. Porter, 26 and an African American, is the first of six police officers to be tried in Gray’s death. He has been charged with with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Street protests began almost immediately.

Let’s review this disaster so far, shall we? Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Most Likely To Really Tick Off Black Lives Matter: Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, Who Names “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” As One Of The Biggest Lies Of The Year

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

hands up3

Thank you, Glenn.

Thank you, Washington Post

Now somebody tell Black Lives Matter, all of the copycat activist groups, and all the progressive, pandering politicians, like Bernie Sanders, currently giving deference and respect to such groups that still tacitly use Dorian Johnson’s Big Lie in their literature and demonstrations. Somebody tell the Democratic National Committee, which endorses Black Lives Matters, shameless race-baiters that they are. Is the antecedent ambiguous? Never mind: race-baiters applies to both.

Most of all, somebody tell America’s African Americans, most of whom have been conditioned to believe the lie, and thus to believe that young Mike Brown was executed on the streets of Ferguson because he was black. They have been thus taught so they distrust whites, law enforcement and their nation,  and so they will vote Democratic.

Here was the original debunking of the lie, in March. I’ve been tracking the lie since before then: it was evoked in Farrakhan’s march on Washington and in August’s Ferguson demonstration. In both cases, the news media soft-peddled the implicit endorsement of a vile falsehood for its value in spreading distrust, fear and hate. Continue reading →

Race-Baiting Scalia (For Doing His Job)

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments
Ignore them, Nino.

Ignore them, Nino.

As is often the case with topics here, I heard about the uproar over Justice Antonin Scalia’s controversial question during oral argument on the latest challenge to affirmative action accidentally, when a Facebook friend re-posted a furious message from his friend calling Scalia a moron and a racist. Even reading a second hand account of what somebody read that Scalia said (the transcript hadn’t been released, but never mind: that was enough for my friend’s African-American friend to call a Supreme Court Justice a racist and for my friend, who is a liberal-minded professor, to endorse it), I could tell that the attack was unfair and worse, outright race-baiting.

What Scalia was alleged to have asked a lawyer was whether affirmative action actually hurt blacks by putting them in “more advanced” institutions, that they “don’t belong” in elite schools. I knew, no matter what Justice Scalia really said, that he was talking about some blacks, not all blacks. That’s obvious: if an African American student can be admitted to an elite school without the “thumb on the scale” of affirmative action, obviously he or she is qualified and belongs there. But more importantly, I knew from personal experience that being admitted to a top school when the student’s credentials wouldn’t normally warrant it could be disastrous.

I worked in the administration of Georgetown Law Center in the late seventies and early eighties, as the school was trying to increase its percentage of black students. I was involved in the process sometimes, and was stunned by its unfortunate revelations: for example, some of the black students we accepted from elite colleges lacked basic reading, writing and critical thinking skills. I remember one Yale grad in particular who could not write a comprehensible sentence.

Georgetown Law set up a special class for these minority students (and a couple of  white “legacy” admits who were sons of wealthy alums, one of which I had specifically told his father could not possibly graduate, based on his college grades and test scores.) Then the school was sued by one of the affirmative action students, who claimed that making him take the remedial class was demeaning and racist. Of course he would have been better off in a less demanding law school. Affirmative action did none of these students any favors. In my opinion then and now, their welfare, confidence and self-esteem was  sacrificed so Georgetown could look progressive, and to the dubious objective of diversity for diversity’s sake.

It wasn’t just my Facebook friend’s friend that was bashing Scalia as a racist. It was much of the news media. “Justice Scalia Suggests Blacks Belong at ‘Slower’ Colleges” reported Mother Jones. “Scalia: Maybe black students belong at ‘less-advanced’ schools” reported The Hill. MSNBC’s slur was Justice Antonin Scalia floats ‘lesser schools’ for black students.  A New York Times editorial—the paper has, it appears, lost its mind– said that Scalia raised an “offensive premise which has not gotten such a full airing at the Supreme Court since the 1950s.” The New York’s Daily News  headlined“SUPREME DOPE” over a photo of Nino. Continue reading →