kpete (46,705 posts)
Letter to My Son "In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.â€
Letter to My Son
“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.â€
TA-NEHISI COATES JUL 4, 2015
.............
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing— race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life. I have sought the answer through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.
So powerful, more:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/
Kathy sees about one black person per month, I would estimate, and it's likely that it's a professional athlete or his wife.This is the most tedious part of DU: some black guy with a really ethnic-sounding name writes some bullshit to or for a relative, with soaring rhetoric, and the lily-white morons squeal in delight and swoon in reverence. No matter WHAT is said. No matter how false or misleading it is.
Meanwhile, in the actual world, using statistics compiled by Barack 0bama's FBI in 2012, here's the actual story:
Read it and cry bullshit, idiot lying scumbag DUmpers.
For those of you pressed for time:
- In 2012, 3,128 white people were victims of homicide.
- Of those, 13% were killed by black people.
- Also in 2012, 2,648 black people were victims of homicide.
- Of those, 7.3% were killed by white people.
- This implies that black-on-white homicide is 89% more frequent than white-on-black homicide.
- White/white homicides comprise 84% of instances in which a white person was killed.
- Black/black homicides comprise 91% of instances in which a black person was killed.
- This implies that black/black homicide is 9% more frequent than white/white.
- In 2012, according to Barack 0bama's FBI statistics, black people committed 2,896 homicides while comprising 12% of the population.
- In 2012, according to Barack 0bama's FBI statistics, white people committed 2,875 homicides while comprising 64% of the population.
- This implies that black people in 2012 were 437% more likely to kill anyone than white people.
From this I infer two things, not mutually exclusive: that Coates is talking about black people's heritage, not America's, and/or these statistics for you DUmmies have to be weighted by the fact that you value black life more than white.
Because I believe that you all find black lives more important than white lives, one can actually solve for the weighting that equates the incidence of homicide by race. It turns out that if you DUmmies value a black life at 2.7x the value of a white life, the homicide rates per capita are nearly equal.
You're welcome: now when you howl that black lives matter, you know by how much more than white people.