John Derbyshire contemplates the way in which the media is no longer able to reliably sustain their chosen Narrative following a nationally-covered incident
The specter of Narrative Collapse hovers over all these kinds of incidents now. The Narrative favored and promoted by black race activists and Main Stream Media Goodwhites is of heartless white authority figures doing violence against helpless, harmless blacks. The MSM do everything they can to reinforce that narrative. That’s why the most-publicized photograph of Trayvon Martin, who was 17 years old when George Zimmerman shot him in 2012, was one taken when he was twelve years old.
In all too many cases, that initial MSM Narrative collapses when all the details come in.
Of the three dead black guys here, two were clearly not harmless. Delrawn Small had a long rap sheet listing 19 arrests. He served three prison terms between 1996 and 2010, for attempted robbery, attempted drug sale to an undercover cop, and a stabbing. Not harmless.
Alton Sterling likewise had a rap sheet showing felony arrests. His court-appearance history across the last 21 years includes battery both simple and aggravated, public intimidation, carnal knowledge of a juvenile, domestic violence, burglary, receiving stolen goods, robbery, theft, drug possession, resisting arrest, possession of stolen firearm, sound reproduction without consent, and failure to register as a sex offender.
The third shootee, Philando Castile, may have been harmless: His only criminal offenses have been low-level traffic misdemeanors. Of all three cases, this is the one you’d have to say is least likely to suffer Narrative Collapse, although on the knowledge we have so far, it’s not impossible the shooting was justified.
The underlying issue here: the very high levels of violence and criminality among blacks.
The differences are really enormous. But government and the MSM do their best to play them down, for fear we Badwhite peasants will march on the ghetto with pitchforks and flaming brands. So ordinary citizens are startled, even disbelieving, when you show them the numbers.
My colleague Edwin S. Rubinstein has crunched those numbers, with references to official sources, in his booklet The Color of Crime. Here’s a couple at random:
- In 2013, a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder
- A black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa.
Etc. If you remove Hispanics from the non-black category—which is hard to do, as the authorities would prefer you didn’t—the differences for homicide are even greater.
In a society where blacks are living among non-blacks, it’s natural and reasonable for blacks to be regarded by the rest of us as dangerous. This isn’t as much a factor for us middle-class types moving among well-socialized middle-class blacks. But for cops, who have to deal with the underclass, it’s got to be on their minds in every encounter. No wonder they’re on a hair-trigger in arrest and traffic stop situations.
There isn’t much to be done about this.
Derb is correct. Contra the decades of denial and equalitarian propaganda pushed by the blank-slate Left, the core problem is not one of poverty, racism, government destruction of the family, or any of the other excuses offered for uncivilized African behavior. The problem is simply that Africans are not yet, on average, entirely civilized.
This is not their fault nor should it surprise anyone with even a modicum of historical knowledge, as they simply haven’t had enough time to work through the thousand-year process of systematically having their uncivilized members removed from the breeding pool as the formerly-uncivilized Germans and and French and English and Scandinavians did. No people can accomplish in 400 years what took everyone else 700 to one thousand, especially when their incentives have been dyscivic for much of that time.
Before you start shrieking “racist” at me, note that the same thing is more or less true for the American Indian, although the Indians were at a higher level of pre-civilization, the Indian genetic makeup and behavioral proclivities are different, most of the Indian population was genocided, and many of those that remain are safely segregated on reservations, so the Indian lack of full civilization is less apparent to most white observers.
To understand how Indian sub-civilization tends to manifest, look south of the border.
