The charge against him was dropped Tuesday, but Gates said he plans to use the attention and turn his intellectual heft and stature to the issue of racial profiling. He now wants to create a documentary on the criminal justice system, informed by the experience of being arrested not as a famous academic but as an unrecognized black man.
Borrrinnng.
Back here I showed that Google searches for various phrases associated with identity politics show downward trends over the past several years, which I take to show less and less interest in such topics. In particular, the alleged racism surrounding Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six, and the Duke lacrosse hoax didn't catch anyone's attention. They made the news for a little bit (the lacrosse case for a little longer, just because the trial lasted longer than a hurricane), but once the event itself was done, everyone went back to business as usual. Importantly, there were no massive riots as there were during the social hysteria of the early 1990s when the "not guilty" verdict in the Rodney King case sparked the disastrous L.A. riots of 1991, or the other L.A. riots of the late 1960s. Therefore, no one will care about Gates' run-in with the police in 2009.
In fact, here's a graph showing the frequency of the term "racial profiling" in the NYT from its first appearance in 1994 up through 2008:
In the late '90s and early 2000s, there was a hysteria about this term, but it was short-lived, and it wasn't large enough to trigger riots. If Gates plans to make a documentary about "racial profiling," he will be dealing with a nauseatingly unfashionable topic -- although you figure he'd market it to Gen X and Boomer dipshits anyway, among whom it's still a favorite buzzword. But don't expect it to catch on -- blacks have shown very little enthusiasm for taking it to the streets lately. There will probably be another massive social hysteria in the middle of the next decade, so if he wants a big audience, he should wait until then to release it.
Were white people supposed to be rioting because the lacrosse players were arrested, or blacks because the charges were dropped? Both that and Gates seem quite different situations from Rodney King.
ReplyDeleteLess Wrong just recently put up a post dealing with the Duke Lacrosee non-rape case.
Blacks because the charges were dropped -- or hell, even when the allegations were made.
ReplyDeleteGates did a really interesting DVD series in which he visited the wonders of Ancient Africa- all the magnificent "lost civilizations". Throughout, his romantic notions are dashed time and time again.
ReplyDeleteHe meets descendants of a black slave trader, who argue that it was no big deal, and they are proud of their ancestor D'Souza, even though they all look black as can be themselves. He sees that blacks actually sold the other blacks into slavery, and most don't feel too bad about it, because they claim they were all defeated in battle or were criminals. One man of the Ashanti tribe attacks Gates, saying the slaves' descendants, like Gates himself, lead far better lives than those left behind. He meets black/arab mixed people who claim they are all arab, and look down their nose at blacks. He meets Arabs who tell him they would never marry a black, but "try not to look down on those who do". He tells everyone he meets he is descended from slaves and they couldn't care less. He meets blacks who even today have other blacks as slaves, and is told the slave doesn't mind it because it is "interesting" to him to be a slave. He tries to pull out his "holier than thou" act again and again, and they all smile at him.
The fact that Africa is helpless to stop Arab/Islamic colonization, and the scope of this colonization is really amazing. He even runs into Farrakhan in Africa, who criticizes him for calling him anti-Semitic in an article, and he meekly accepts his reproaches.
Not until he gets to South Africa, and confronts a white guy who built an entertaining faux-historical African theme park, does his "you're a racist" tantrum finally work. All along the way he also pulls out his "I'm disabled because I use a cane" schtick, and gets no traction.
He is a weakling, a girly man among the Africans, who only has power when he pulls the puppet strings of white guilt. It's also entertaining to watch the married Gates flirt unsuccessfully with African women throughout the series. Guess his wife wasn't too worried about losing him. Also amusing to watch him try to haggle over the price of kente cloth with an African woman in a market, by saying "but I'm a professor, we're all so poor!", lol!
I read about his encounter with the cops, and he even tries to play the "I'm disabled" card with them. The fact is that blacks in America and Africa have far more to fear from the more vigorous and unapologetic brown and arab races than from the whites, but until they are overwhelmed, they may as well try to get as many freebies using the achilles heel of white guilt, until they are submerged demographically.
The post over at Less Wrong is pretty lame. The point seems to be that politics causes people to ignore evidence, and that's not exactly news. The reference to the Duke non-rape case is pretty fleeting (the bulk of the article seems to be about Cheerios - I think) and besides, the writer ignores the fact that conservatives turned out to be right about the Duke case. The writer over at Less Wrong seems to be demanding that everyone decide each case "on its merits" and the facts, when of course the arguments usually center around what the facts and "merits" are. Political ideologies are based on what people believe to be trends and general situations, and are probably necessary, or at least inevitable. And incidentally, people do NOT make better decisions when each issue is considered in isolation, as maintained at "LR" - some of the stupidest decisions in human history were made that way.
ReplyDeleteTschafer
I blogged about this here:
ReplyDeleteInstitutional Racism: The Chimera of Black Studies
The dispatcher-Crowley tapes exist, and the CC police department is mulling over releasing them.
ReplyDeleteI deeply hope that they do. People need to hear the truth.
If we dont get to hear the tapes, the left will spin this as a racial crime in six months time just as the left still insists that, "something happened in that house that night" in regards to the Duke Lacross-faux-rape-faux-kidnapping-faux-sexual assault case. Every chance we have to discredit the left forcefully and completely, and especially expsose them as liars, we need to execute to the fullest folks. We need to play to win.