Our shameful treatment of black and brown people

Allow me to be the next of what will surely be many right-leaning Internet blowhards jumping on Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.  His ham-handed attempt to blame Liberal boogermen the NRA and Sarah Palin for Chicago’s crime problems amuse more than outrage.  Why wasn’t Sarah Palin at the crime scene with you?  Why wasn’t fellow private citizen Michael Moore?  What is she, Mayor of Newark?  Governor of New Jersey?  Batman?

He’d probably get the same applause if he tied it to Chris Christie’s budget cuts, except sans the baffling non-sequitur and even scoring a few points with the Union brass.  He explicitly said she was caribou hunting and not stalking Ice-T along  with special guest star Rutger Hauer, right?  Was he envisioning a tightly-clad-in-leather Palin at the crime scene handcuffed in the back of a cruiser reciting the Necronomicon from memory with blood dripping from her fangs?

It’s the leather-clad thing that bothers him the most.

Nay, that would be the easy way to avoid discussing – “because everybody’s afraid of race,” as McCarthy said – America’s shameful legacy of government-sponsored racism.  I salute his courage.  It’s rare these days to see a public official broach the subject of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and racism when attacking a Conservative entity.  I shall heed his call to wade into the morass of government-sponsored racism.

McCarthy is, of course, correct that races have been treated unfairly by government at the Federal, State, and Local levels.  Unfortunate, true, and there’s nothing we can do to erase it.  Other than that, I’m completely unable recognize where he’s coming from.  Nor he me, I suppose.

I’ll put all the racist rest behind the fold since I haven’t droned on at y’all in a while…

]]>< ![CDATA[Segregation ended before I was born.  Overt, systematic, sanctioned racism is something I've never known.  A history lesson.  But I also know being born white in the US is winning the lottery of life.  I was also born reasonably intelligent to smart parents and sent to good schools.  Who am I to talk about racism? Well I believe a black, brown, yellow, red, whatever child raised in my place would have turned out more or less as I did.  Just like Billy Ray in Trading Places.  Remember how Mortimer and Randolph had a photo of Reagan on their desk?  In old-money Philadelphia.  The two evil racist guys in the movie.  The ones just like me because we believe environment is more important than genetics when determining a person’s lot in life. My grannie grew up dirt poor in the Texas Hill Country.  My mom was born dirt poor in-and-around WWII in Wimberly, Texas.  At some point her old man split and left Grannie alone to raise her, my aunt, and uncle.  The only thing standing between me and poor white trash is my mom’s work ethic.  She worked her ass off after my old man passed to make sure I went to good schools.  I was a smart-mouthed little bastard too. So life throws everyone twists.  Sometimes you get chicken, sometimes you get feathers.  Some people make chicken salad out of chicken shit, some people blame dead white people for all the chicken shit. Grannie, growing up in the Texas Hill Country, almost surely met LBJ in person at some point in her life.  Maybe even got paid to vote for LBJ by the man himself.  Either way, she was a life-long, yellow dog Democrat.  Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, Grannie, she was also by today’s definition an insufferable racist.  And almost certainly so in the way she thought as well.  If the mentally sharp, cognizant Grannie of my youth were transported to 2008 and forced to choose between Obama and McCain she probably would have voted Republican for the first time in her life. I bring LBJ into the conversation because he was the same sort of racist as Grannie.  They didn’t hate blacks.  They just didn’t believe blacks were capable of doing certain jobs.  Looked down upon.  The soft bigotry of low expectations but with no compunction about calling blacks “niggers”. Grannie said it like it was nothing.  No venom, I think that was just the only word she knew for black person.  I don’t think less of her because of it.  She was born when the Civil War was still a recent memory.  She lived through government sponsored racism.  In the South.  Environment and all. LBJ grew up in the same environment and saw the poverty of the Texas Hill Country and the blacks in particular as a product of their inability to function at the same level as whites.  Plus, he knew there’s no surer way to a voter’s heart than through his pocket.  He sold out their responsibility to provide for a family out of pity and scorn to buy a constituency. His War on Poverty has worked out about as well as the War on Drugs for black and brown people.  Drug prohibition is government-sponsored racism that dates back to the good old days when a congress critter wasn’t afraid to stand up in the Capital and say the thought of cocaine-crazed Negroes,  marijuana-addled Mexicans, and opium-peddling Chinamen plowing white women made them physically ill.  But I digress.  Regardless of LBJ and every other government-re-allocation-of-wealth advocate’s best intentions the end result is Garry McCarthy blaming government-sponsored racism courtesy of the NRA and Sarah Palin for inner-city Chicago’s roving gang problems. Would it blow your mind to learn the first gun control laws were government sponsored racism intended to keep Southern blacks from defending themselves against racist attacks on their homes?  What if I told you gun control laws to keep inner-city blacks from defending themselves against other blacks just as ruthless as the Ku Klux Klan attacking them in their own home aren’t racist?  The very idea they should be permitted to own a firearm is preposterously racist.  Blacks owning guns responsibly?  The very idea! I wonder if McCarthy would argue stiffer gun laws would reduce violence but the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder.  That’s one to think about.  Maybe stiffer gun laws under penalty of death are the answer. And I haven’t even talked about brown people.  Gun laws affect them exactly the same way.  Stricter gun laws could ensure those that honor gun laws are easy prey for any criminal willing to risk a weapons charge on top of the rape/murder/burglary/mugging. Whites just flee to the suburbs and gun up.  Along with the blacks and browns ambitious enough to flee.  The ones left are stuck sending their kids to crummy schools at the whim of public sector Unions and corrupt politicians.  With a poor education and few other ways to escape they’re stuck in an endless cycle of poverty. Chicago politics is clearly the worst of the worst and they’ve doomed the whole state of Illinois to ruin. At the risk of being called a racist, I’ll wager that a black man murdered with a gun was murdered by a black man 90% of the time.  Brown man by another brown man probably between 80-90% of the time.  White man by a white man about the same.  Interracial murder is a small percentage.  Some entirely racially motivated, most not. So McCarthy is off in Area 51 land.  The NRA and Sarah Palin – riding a wave of white racist TEA Party support – are secretly waging a campaign for gun laws designed to put guns in the hands of black and brown children who will have no other choice but to kill one another.  They took away our slaves, and they took away our Jim Crow, then our segregation.  But I’ll be damned if they can take away an inner-city black man’s right to bear arms ! Throw in something about the Jews and Jeremiah Wright hisownself would scream “God Damn America!”  In a joyous way. I’m willing to cut McCarthy slack because he’s up against huge odds.  He’s top law dog in a town run by Chicago politics and unions.  There’s no way he can solve Chicago’s crime problem.  They’re fiscally cooked.  He obviously doesn’t have the resources to stop crimes.  He’s a hack, like me.  And it’s not like the audience wasn’t eating it up. Government has failed all races at all levels.  We are doomed.  Politicians and bureaucrats like Garry McCarthy have mortgaged the future and so saddled the economy with regulations and uncertainty default is inevitable.  Black, brown, white will all pay.  Government-sponsored racism, generational theft, income redistribution, regulatory minutia; the holocaust cloak our government has woven for us is a rich tapestry indeed. I eagerly await February 2013 when fine public servants like Garry McCarthy can take pride in  their hometown Chicago adding “Home of America’s Newest Worst Ex-President” to its other monikers like “Where Shameless Corruption Isn’t Just a Way of Life, It’s All We Know,” “Birthplace of Illinois’ Fiscal Ruin,” and “Maybe Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow Was Sent Back In Time To Save Us All”.