Doofus Of The Day #784

Today's award goes to an associate professor of African studies at Emory University, who writes:

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.

. . .

A little more than half a century after Brown, the election of Obama gave hope to the country and the world that a new racial climate had emerged in America, or that it would. But such audacious hopes would be short-lived. A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger.

. . .

So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14 years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws.

Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.

There's much more at the link.  Go read it and weep, for her and for everyone who sees the world through such distorted spectacles.

Her views are ridiculous, of course, ignoring many (if not most) of the facts of the matter.  The tragedy is, she actually believes what she wrote - and so do a great many people on her side of the fence, whether they're there for racial or ideological reasons.  There's no logic or rationality to their beliefs.  They cling to their misguided, wrongheaded ideas like they're the True Cross.  They cannot and will not entertain even the notion that they've got it all wrong, despite abundant evidence to that effect.  (When I wrote about contrasting opinions on the Ferguson situation last week, I titled it "There are none so blind as those who will not see".  The article cited above is yet another example of such blindness.)

Prof. Anderson earns our Doofus award for her words . . . but by rights it should go to everyone who refuses to deal with race relations in America on the basis of reality.  She's merely today's poster child for their wilful self-delusion.




Peter