Black Talk

I hesitate to get into this because people are sick of my preaching, but the hell with it. The fact is that Bill Bennett’s racist statement is actually just one of many that are apparently happening all over right wing radio in the wake of Katrina:

Here’s another example:

As if Hurricane Katrina victims didn’t have enough going against them, now they’re the latest targets of hate radio. Just listen to WFTL-AM (850), the 50,000-watt home of the Florida Marlins. It’s also the home of some of the most radical right-wing voices in America.

One regular syndicated host, Atlanta-based Neil Boortz, contended after the disaster struck that a “huge percentage” of the evacuees from New Orleans were “parasites, like ticks on a dog.” Then he warned, “They are coming to a community near you.”

When a caller remarked that most of the evacuees were fat, Boortz readily agreed. “They didn’t drown because you couldn’t push them underwater if you had to,” he chortled.

Then there’s Kelley Mitchell, who spent a week broadcasting at the Houston Astrodome among flood victims. Mitchell, a big-boned blond who spent years on South Florida television news stations, didn’t seem too concerned about the harrowing stories from the people in the stadium. Instead she was virtually obsessed with the reports of looting and railed for days against the alleged behavior of poor New Orleans blacks during the disaster. She took to calling the state “Lose-iana” and announced she was boycotting any monetary donations to the victims.

“If I heard, ‘I’m looking for my mom, my dad, and my baby daddy again,’ I would cringe,” she said, referring to the victims who had lost relatives. “Everybody knows it’s important to speak English but these knuckleheads.”

[…]

Another Mitchell gem: “When I see bad behavior … that’s when it became about race. Whoever got over deep-seated prejudices is now wondering if it was right to do so.”

[…]

“We need to let black America know we do want you, but we want you on the terms of the United States of America,” she explained in a voice that sometimes sounds eerily similar to that of similarly built actress Kathy Bates. “And we want you to be full and complete human beings.”

Isn’t that special? “We” do want you. Apparently, black Americans, many of whom had ancestors wwho ere here a century or two before many right wing racist assholes’ are now provisional Americans who have to adhere to certain “terms of the United States of America.” I guess she wants to send them “back” to Africa if they fail to comply.

Ugh.

And, by the way, Bennett’s crime is that he essentially said “blacks are born criminals.” Certainly, you can say that aborting any number of discrete demographic groups could have an effect on the crime rate, but attributing it to race suggests something immutable. Males commit more crimes than females at least partly because of biological characteristics. Poor people of all races commit more crimes (at least a certain kind of crimes) because of their economic circumstances and cultural influences. Statistically, Blacks may commit more crimes than whites because of both of the above reasons, but there is nothing in the color of their skin or their DNA that makes them more likely to commit crimes than anyone else.

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