Yes, you read the title correctly. I purposely wrote it that way and will stand by it, especially after an interview he gave that was published in the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Basically, Obama reasserted his promises to make sure that Hispanics and blacks are scrutinized less by the criminal justice simply because of their skin color, no matter what the severity of the crime or how much evidence is against them. Obama might as well have said that if a white person commits a crime, prosecute them to the full extent of the law, but if a non-white commits the same crime, let them go because of their skin color.
It may be that I am being blunt, but taking someone's skin color into consideration is a complete departure from Dr. Martin Luther King who said that "content of character" was paramount and "color of skin" should not be considered at all.
Writing for Front Page Magazine, John Perazzo looks at the issue more closely and brings up some very thought provoking points. It turns out that racial profiling does not play a significant role in the judicial system decision making process, but that other factors do:
| The most exhaustive, best designed study of this matter—a three-year analysis of more than 11,000 convicted criminals in California—found that the severity of offenders’ sentences depended heavily on such factors as prior criminal records, the seriousness of the crimes, and whether guns were used in the commission of those crimes. Race was found to have no effect whatsoever. In fact the researcher, Joan Petersilia, was forced to admit that these results contradicted conclusions she had drawn from an earlier study—in which she had not taken prior convictions and the use of firearms into account. |
But what about the race issue? Where is that coming from?
Read this:
| Black overrepresentation is almost entirely at the arrest stage—reflecting the simple fact that the “average” black breaks the law more frequently than the “average” white. |
And this:
| The National Crime Victimization Surveys, conducted annually by the Census Bureau, show that statistically the “average” black is far more likely than the “average” white to be identified, by a victim or witness, as the perpetrator of a violent crime. This racial gap, moreover, is approximately equal to the racial gap in actual arrest rates. “As long ago as 1978,” says Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, “a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim identifications and in arrests—a finding replicated many times since, across a range of crimes.” |
The fact that blacks engage in more crimes than whites is never mentioned by Old Media and was certainly not mentioned by the Barack Obama campaign or transition team. It is an embarrassment to them to tell the truth about this issue. If they did tell the truth, they wouldn't be able to play the race card.
In fact, the decisions after the arrest tend to favor blacks more than whites:
More:
| At all the decision points subsequent to arrest, the outcomes are virtually identical for blacks and whites alike—and the slight differences that do exist tend to favor blacks.[2] In studies that consider all relevant variables—such as the defendant’s prior criminal record, the severity of the crime in question, the offender’s demeanor with police, whether a weapon was used, and whether the crime in question was victim-precipitated—no differences have been found in sentencing patterns, either in relation to the victim’s race or the offender’s race.[3] |
Barack Obama's comments about the alleged disparities in the criminal justice system are nothing more than attempts at race-baiting a la Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright. For a man who says he didn't know about Wright's racial tirades and would have left the church had he known, Obama sure does seem to want to implement Wright's philosophy of racial hatred in his policies.
While Obama harps on this, notice that he is also ignoring things like the fact that inter-racial crime is more likely to be black-on-white than any other scenario. If Obama really wants to be the "post-racial" candidate, rather than the same-old, same-old race-baitor of the past thirty years, he will demonstrate "change" by taking the racial rhetoric out of his policies and go foward with Dr. King's dream of "not by color of skin but by content of character" fresh in his mind.
You can access the complete article on-line here:
Obama: Tilting At Racial Windmills
John Perrazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 16, 2008
No comments:
Post a Comment