So a couple weeks back, I wrote that scathing letter to the City Paper taking Larnell Custis Butler to task for blaming everying thing in the world on racist white cops. Needless to say certain idiots (for example, infamous serial trolls with initials GC among others ) and people without a firm intellectual footing missed the point wholesale. While I don’t doubt for a minute that violence and gun related crime have a very definite correlation with poverty, I also doubt that you can explain away the totality of the urban crime quagmire on poverty either. Pretty clearly other socioeconomic and cultural factors must explain the disparity between crime rates amongst various demographics. If you’re an idiot, you might mistake what I’m saying as something either somehow inappropriate or even bigoted.
In any event, a recent study noting that yes, it’s not just your imagination or media hype, but very much the reality that some demographics are over represented in violence stats, is getting nationwide notice. As Uncle notes, apparently we’re not supposed to talk about such things.
Case in point: apparently Jonathan Rochkind thinks I shouldn’t talk about these sorts of issues in public. Really? Frankly I don’t see how we address issues like this without talking about it myself. Unsurprising that weak minded folk don’t agree. My response, which may or may not be printed, since I’m saying something that’s apparently quite unpopular, appears below.
Mr. Rochkind’s response to my telling-it-like-it-is letter makes abundantly clear one thing only: discussing urban blight’s root causes is way more than he can stomach in grownup fashion. Though I’m curious why he’s “not surprised” re: its contents (we don’t know each other), even a precursory look at his objections reveals them to be the weak-borscht knee-jerk thinking that’s gotten us into this mess (and given good liberals a bad name) in the first place. He argues by foot-stomping fiat that liberals and civil rights activists are precluded from discussing the cultural factors and values that affect criminality and homicidal behavior. Where is that written, kind sir?
Why would he be surprised that I would use a public forum to note that cultural factors influence criminality? Where the hell else should we talk about these types of things? I’m not saying anything Bill Cosby, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evars have not also said—to succeed, the black community should hold itself to a higher standard, reject intra-community violence, police itself, and shed the elements of its culture that accept criminality. This simple statement in no way exculpates white racism or poverty. But there are lots of poor communities. They don’t all blast each other into Murder, Ink the way some unfortunate folk in Baltimore do. Why not discuss this painful reality? Just saying “it’s all poverty” and ending the discussion is anti-intellectualism at its worst. He suggests my inclusion of culture in the discussion (instead of racial identity, as some bigots would) is incompatible with liberalism, which doesn’t say much for his closed-minded brand of liberalism.
And what does he think culture is, if not the values a community shares and how it responds to problems it faces? He notes the problems I’d list–poverty, lack of economic opportunity in post industrial urban America, etc. So why is my follow-on observation that the black community rises and falls by way of how it confronts (or fails to confront) such issues something to hide away from public view? Maybe I’m supposed to shut up because I’m merely a World-Centric, Pan-Euro-American heterosexual male?
His thesis is the same tired, hackneyed, no-way-forward intellectual surrender we’ve gotten used to from people afraid to confront harsh truths–in this case that destitution and poverty affect ALL races, yet you can’t explain away criminality rates with a simple “crime equals poverty” equation. Plenty of other minority communities contend with extreme poverty, but not all have the same Murder, Ink issues Ms. Butler laments. Different communities deal with poverty in different ways, and if that isn’t part of a community’s culture, then what is? Liberalism and Baltimore are both done a disservice if Ms. Butler and Mr. Rochkind successfully stifle discussion on this point.
The Pan European quip is, for those who don’t read the CP regularly, a jab at Ms. Butler, whose weekly diatribes in the CP invariably include a reference to the fact that she’s an “Afrocentric, Feminist Lesbian” and so on and so forth. She’s the poster child of identity politics, the idea that your racial identity and social position immutably mandate what your politics should look like.
