by Tom Kando
On August 9, officer Darren Wilson killed an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, MO. Since then, there have been daily confrontations in that community between angry black crowds and the police - “race riots” if you will. The verdict is not in as to what happened exactly. I am not going to delve into who did what. The situation is still unfolding. What I DO want to do, is share with you what I experienced when I clicked on the following article: “Police Identify Officer, Allege Teen Robbed Store” By David A. Lieb and Alan Scher Zagier; AP; (Yahoo News Home Page).
Within a few hours of this publication there were over 45,000 comments. I scrolled down the first hundred or so. It was shocking. 99.9% of them were unmitigated white racist rage. Unfathomable hatred of blacks. I won’t speculate about the representativeness of this sample. But here are thousands upon thousands of vicious anonymous racist comments in just ONE article on ONE website. There must be dozens of millions more such opinions elsewhere. It seems to me that white America is turning into a catastrophe. I hope that I am wrong.
Here are some recurring themes in these dozens of thousands of racist comments:
● Blacks are lazy leaches supported by hard-working white taxpayers.
● Problems such as the trouble in Ferguson are President Obama’s fault.
● ...as well as the fault of black leaders such as Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson.
● The media are largely biased in favor of minorities, and they hate whites.
● Black culture is dysfunctional because it is matriarchal. Of course, these semi-illiterate commentators don’t phrase this well, but many white racists have picked up one thing: If you want to disparage an entire race, it is no longer fashionable to talk about genetic inferiority. Many racists (e.g. Rush Limbaugh or Fox’s Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly) now hang their racism on the “nurture” side of the nature-nurture divide. This makes racism more “respectable.” “Dysfunctional black culture” is the new code.
Apparently, the Obama presidency has lanced a puss boil of white racism in this country. Somehow, our first black presidency, instead of causing joy at the possibility of post-racialism, has brought a lot of white racism out of the closet. The millions of vile comments you see on the Internet suggest this. Here is a tiny sample:
● “They tried to say that this big monkey was so innocent, etc. What a bunch of BS you reported, you dammed leftwinged media!! The dammed media should be held responsible for everything that went down. Thanks to them egging the blacks on to their second nature of rioting and looting, the blacks are all at home watching their free big screen t.v.s, wearing their new clothes, using their new IPODS, you name it they smashed the stores and stole it. They should have turned the machine guns on those animals! What do you say about that, king monkey sharpton?!
● “who cares. This guy was a burden to society robbing people walking down the middle of the street with NO respect for the people driving on it. Acting like a bunch of 3rd world morons don't justify your cause it just makes you all look like a. fool”
● MockBarack Obamaneedsjob:
“Unfortunately the least economically, academically successful and most prone to violence demographic on the bottom rung of society are unable to process information like humans. Quickly frustrated because of this lack of intelligence, they immediately become frenzied and violent causing more property damage that the working class will have to pay for.”
● “Blacks think that they are above reproach because they are Black. Tthey think that they can just walk into a store and take what they want without paying. I live in a State where there are only 1.8% Blacks and these parasites create 30% of the crime. Blacks as a whole are nothing but trouble. In every city in America where Blacks reside and are the majority, they are destructive and violent and our prisons confirm this with 73% of the prisoners being Black. These people have no family values as 72% of them come from unwed, single parent families. The education is nonexistent as 75% of them drop out of school and cannot read, write or even speak correct English. No wonder they have the highest unemployment rate, they are unskilled and illiterate...
● “Savages always bring out the spears and clubs when they lose one of thier own even when the one they lost was commiting crimes, But hey, they were burning the businesses that served THEM, too worried that if they went after the white part of town they might get shot. They can't reason, can't think for themselves, don't respect anyone, and can't let working people do thier jobs. This stupid overgrown poarchmonkey got what he deserved. He probably thought that him being 6'5" and 250 lbs would scare off a cop. I am former military I am as tall as he was, yet I don't weigh as much I am fit and could have eaten this welps lunch if I had to deal with him. This " I am black and I'll cry racism" #$%$ is over and done you fools played it too much, ain't working no more.”
● Someone who cares: “Damn black thief's! They can't work, they can't speak English but boy their moms sure teach them to live off other peoples tax dollars and then steal the rest. Too bad the store owner did not have a gun and shoot him. All I can say is one down and a hell of a lot more that need to go the same way!”
● “I'd like to see one of these black thugs try to do that to someone who could actually fight back. The black thug would shrivel up faster than my ¢:ΓΈ:¢:k would after seeing one of his ugly, smelly, fat a:s:s baby mammas...”
● Buffalo Bill: “This is ALL BS!!! The real problem is blacks get away with this behavior and white people are forced to pay welfare and the government keeps promoting this...White people are tired of paying for you to live the life you're living. Your party needs to end and YOU need to work!!!! All this is just a symptom of a deeper problem...black laziness which equals this shooting and others like it...black on black whatever...We need to fix the cause and the symptoms will disappear...it's called WORK!”
● “I suppose M. Brown could have been another one of Obama's sons. After all, he did something stupid and against the law, gets killed, and of course it is someone else's fault. What will they do if they don't have whitey paying billions so there is some government bureaucracy that takes care of their every need?
● “Yet again, Barack Obama stuck his nose in deep & his foot in his mouth by trying to stir up his black base. Yet again, blacks destroyed property & stole merchandise from innocent business owners as the media portrayed THEM as the victims. STOP!! America has had enough, black people!! Learn to act like decent human beings. Our FATHERS taught us. That's your problem. Your men aren't man enough to stick around long enough for the stains to dry.”
● “I wasn't raised to be to care about what the color of someone's skin. Now I am beginning to wish most blacks could be sent back to Africa. Get jobs, get an education and raise your families to respect other people's property. All the blacks that I see on tv in this story make me so sick.”
● “I don't hate anyone but I have to say it makes it very hard to like anyone with black skin. As a child we lived in a nice middle-class neighborhood. We had a black family with a son my age. I always tried to be friends with him until I finally got tired of him stealing my things. We didn't own slaves and we're not keeping you down, you're keeping yourselves down...”
● "give these primitive creatures a fire , a log to pound on and a " chant " and these savages will whip themselves into a 20 million yrs. BC frenzy . I believe that the " witness's " are LYING . I also believe that Da Kang and his pimp in the DOJ will force the state to try this cop just as they did in Fl.”
As I wrote in a similar article a few months ago, (Is this Germany in the 1930s all over again?). This is only the tip of the iceberg. Frightening. leave comment here
© Tom Kando 2014
19 comments:
What is even more disturbing is how the Police prevented the press from covering the ensuing demonstrations.
Watch this video (the 2nd one) to see how a SWAT team is taking down an Al Jazeera America crew's television lights and tilting the TV camera toward the ground.
Tom:
Thanks for taking the time to post this information. The divide between whites and blacks, rich and poor, is growing and will have terrible consequences.
No more race relations it seems. Our country is heading backwards rather than forward.
Do you know if there is any way of tracking where (state, region) the remarks come from? Would the newspaper have a way of doing that?
Hey Tom, I am very glad you wrote this in your blog. The sort of comments that you cite here are so uncomfortable I never go out to look at them. What a wake up call! It really is difficult to believe that so many people have these backward, ignorant beliefs. Our society must really be so segregated, that these white Americans haven't personally known anyone of color, and therefore know that there's really no difference between people regardless of their color. Thanks for writing this.
Sent from my iPhone
I agree and have forwarded it to several people.
I thank everyone for their comments, including Mary, Don and Margo.
Madeleine rightly brings up the authorities’ trampling upon press freedom (called First Amendment in this country), as if this were Russia or Iran.
To Scott, I can only reply that the Internet is nebulous and protects the anonymity of cowardly hate-mongers. Just as a hunch (= “hypothesis”?) maybe a large proportion of this hate mail comes from the South, followed by the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states. The South, because of its peculiar culture, and the other regions because they are rural. But I am now practicing amateur sociology, i.o.w. engaging in prejudice, just like the racists whom I accuse.
Let me add something that I didn’t say in my article, something obvious to anyone who has taken an introductory sociology class: The killing of Michael Brown was only a trigger, a match that lit the fuse of deep-seated despair. Any student of collective behavior knows that riots don’t take place in a vacuum. Black violence in Ferguson is only a symptom, as were the far worse uprisings in Watts in 1965, Los Angeles in 1992, Detroit in 1943, 1967 and 1984, and elsewhere throughout the history of this country. Such outbursts will continue, as long as the disease persists. The underlying disease is the unsatisfactory relationship between blacks and whites, especially blacks and white law enforcement, and the continued economic inequality between the races. This is a no brainer.
Carol Anita Ryan Can't say I like it, who are these idiots making the comments? Tom Kando never fears tackling the difficult topics.
I've seen an unmistakable increase in hate groups in the last decade & a half coinciding with the internet. I grew up in Vallejo (the most diverse city in America according to Brown University) with occasional stints staying sometimes a year with my grandmother in the heart of the Ozarks. And spent weeks at my cousins in Arnold Missouri not far from Ferguson. I occasionally ran into racist in Missouri back then & in rural parts of Napa county inhabited by poor whites, before it became upscale as it is now. But the racist in California were never as viscerally filled with hate as the Missourians. Now when I go back to Missouri I'm troubled & often very scared traveling with my Southeast Asian wife & mixed race kids seeing a noticeable proliferation of Confederate flags, especially knowing without doubt what it's meant to communicate & it's not southern pride. But even a couple years ago at my niece's graduation in Lincoln a suburb of Sacramento a hate group with conferate flags set up behind the endzone on private property with the attempt to intimidate. The visceral hatred I saw in hate groups in Missouri 30 years ago I've seen in northern California from Ft Bragg to suburbs of Sacramento. That viral spread no doubt through the internet is terrifying. Although in urban areas it's rare the deindustrialization of rural America combined with the internet has provided fertal ground for hate groups to spread & control wide swaths of territory not unlike ISIS it can spread fast.
Roy,
this is by far the best comment you have ever made on my blog.It's right on the money. I believe every word of it.
Thank you Professor. I still maintain based on a disagreement on an earlier post that often the cause of economic problems within the black community is in part due to cultural traits among many that inhibit progress. These negative cultural traits among many in poor black communities are often shared by poor whites as well but society is more forgiving if you're white. White, black, Hispanic or Asian my friends that succeeded in escaping the poverty & violence of the neighborhood had one common denominator, the values, discipline & perseverance instilled into us through martial arts. But all too common many of my black friends equated academic success with "trying to be white" and were told by peers that "white people won't let you do those jobs! That's a white mans trick making you think that". Including my best friend 7th through 9th grade who now is doing life & his friend who caused me to distance myself from him Andre Hicks better known as the famous Rapper Mac Dre, killed in a shootout a few years ago. Not to say that racism isn't a huge factor holding African Americans back, but to ignore attitudes in the community as a factor only hurts the community that is often in denial that those attitudes are a factor & reinforces the racist cause by not accepting an axiomatic truth as a cause. The sharp decrease in Black youth dropouts post 2009 was attributed to Obama because the perception that you couldn't succeed through education was beginning to shatter. Yet the false perception hasn't quite dissolved completely & the path of success through education now beeing recognized today as a viable path among the Black community,comes too late for many who long ago embarked on a different path. I recal Varano's urban society class historical evolution of the destruction of the once thriving urban black community.Deindustrialization of the inner city causing skilled black workers to lose employment, desegregation removing the professional class to white neighborhoods, welfare policies that encouraged the absence of fathers in the home, and the final death nail the introduction of crack cocaine making drug dealers the only model of success to the youth of the community. We cannot ignore the false perceptions in the black community, especially since government policy created it, as a major cause for the failures of success in the black community. We can't ignore that cause anymore than we could ignore racism as a cause.
Roy,
thanks for your elaborate comment. You say many good things. You must be a Sociology major. I can’t do justice to everything, but here are a few comments:
1. Obviously, culture matters. How can I deny that, as a sociologist? All cultures have good and bad habits - the South has a tradition of violence, Irish and Russians drink too much, the Germans were too rigid and authoritarian, etc. Like every other group, African-Americans have some good habits and some bad habits. But there is a danger that “culture” becomes overrated as a cause, especially when it is used as an excuse for the “benign” neglect of the poor. It can be blaming the victim, saying, “it’s their own damn fault. Why don’t they pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
2. It’s not clear that “government policy created” the problem. This has become a widespread mantra, due to its repeated assertion and nonstop Republican/plutocratic propaganda since Ronald Reagan. But it’s not clear that it is true. All of the favorite conservative “causes” of black poverty - single-headed households, too much government welfare handouts, etc. are HIGHER in Scandinavia and other parts of Western Europe, and yet their rates of crime, delinquency, gangs, and other social problems are lower than ours, even though they are by now as ethnically diverse as we are. It’s really simple: we need more socialism and higher taxes in this country, not less.
3. My topic was not black dysfunction, but vile and frighteningly rampant white racism, which I tried to document. How blacks contribute to their own problems is a topic for another day.
4. At least we seem to agree that it’s not all Obama’s fault.
Professor I agree for the most part but like all things both sides have valid points. You cannot address racism without addressing the cause of problems in the black community. Racism is one cause but not the entire cause. And the economic changes like deindustrialisation & the the flight of black proffesionals after desegregation that took place in the back community & the introduction of crack cocaine is neither conservative or liberal. If you fail to adress the economic & sociological causes racist will claim the cause is genetic inferiority, so it is imparitive that the failure of government policies whether by design or indifference be pointed out as what caused a near decimation of a thriving culture. I would argue that claiming that our ignoring as a society the harm we caused to the black community by by failure to be concerned as to how changes in our economy would affect the urban black community & how the war on drugs would forever alter this section of society is a liberal position. That places the blame on economic policies that enriched the upper stratus of society at the irreparable expense of black America.
I think Roy is onto a major portion of the problem and that government programs are significantly responsible of the breakdown of black families and the ensuing lack of progress in inner city schools. It is important to more than "appoint a bureaucracy and give it money" if you want to fix the problems. Current programs are increasing dependence on welfare in exchange for votes, and this is causing a perpetual class that are basically serfs. No one, black or white, thinks its fair to be treated like a serf.
Gordan I was afraid someone would latch on to the one point about welfare that encouraged fatherless homes & boiled my point down to that. My point is since we cannot dissuade racist people or those uncomfortable with Blacks from irrational fear of black people based on emotion,we must address their fallacious understanding of the cause of the crises in the black community if we are to have any hope of arresting the increased spread if racism. We must communicate that policies like unchecked urban sprawl distancing fatherless black urban youth from both black & white professionals & deindustrialization as the cause. So they understand the violence & lack of professional ambitions is not biologically determined.
Gordan I was afraid someone would latch on to the one point about welfare that encouraged fatherless homes & boiled my point down to that. My point is since we cannot dissuade racist people or those uncomfortable with Blacks from irrational fear of black people based on emotion,we must address their fallacious understanding of the cause of the crises in the black community if we are to have any hope of arresting the increased spread if racism. We must communicate that policies like unchecked urban sprawl distancing fatherless black urban youth from both black & white professionals & deindustrialization as the cause. So they understand the violence & lack of professional ambitions is not biologically determined.
Roy, I do not think the core cause is unchecked urban sprawl or deindustrialization,although lack of jobs for the unskilled is exacerbating the problems. I think culture is more important because it affects ones desire to work in a job, even if one is there. The tools for success begin with with children's observation of work and lifestyle behavior patterns of those they initially mimic, which is why have gainfully employed and productive fathers or mothers is a key to their getting out of that environment. Behavior patterns are fairly firmly set by age 7. After that behavior changes are relearning as "second nature" rather than "first nature."
ADC and other welfare programs have been both a saftey net and an obstacle to success because it has incentivized women not to marry or work. Fatherless urban youth are largely a product of an uncaring government policy that pays people a subsistence payment.
It is likely the restlessness of unemployed youth and hanging around in gangs that causes fear of young black males in general. It is less fear of black people than fear of of such characters.
Hey Tom,
I'm glad you tackled this issue. I tend to forget how stupid the average American is. Like George Carlin said, "Imagine how stupid the average American is. Then realize that half of all Americans are even more stupid".
Gordan the black community was once a thriving even healthy community despite racism & segregation. The chronology of what happened to the community is well documented. Yes welfare policy contributed but that was just the straw that broke the camels back along with the introduction of crack. Deindustrialization, white flight, Urban sprawl which proceeded crack and welfare it would be disingenuous to say those didn't have giant negative effects on black communities.
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