Liberal Washington Post Columnist Richard Cohen Defends George Zimmerman's Racial Profiling of Trayvon Martin

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Steve Sailer calls it "elderly Tourette's Syndrome," when a person of a certain age says something that is true or morally proper, despite being very dangerous politically.

 

In 2005, black car thief Glen Moore, who confessed that he went to lily-white, mobbed-up Howard Beach to steal a car, and also sought with his crime partners to rob a young Italian, Frank Agostini (whose father was an NYPD detective), got beaten to a pulp for his trouble. (Agostini said they tried to rob him; as far as I know, Moore didn't confess to that crime.) NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Mike Bloomberg gave speeches before black mobs, in which they sympathized with the black criminal, calling him a victim of a "hate crime," gave him a fortune of the white and Asian taxpayers' money, and denounced the Italians who did the right thing as "racists," and sent them up for a long time, except for the cop's son. <a href=http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2008/10/howard-beach-ii-more-white-male.html>That was the second Howard Beach Hate Crime Hoax</a>.

 

My Mom, who is about the same age as Richard Cohen, and like him, a socialist Jew, and very solicitous of blacks, had no sympathy for the black car thief.
Granted, she didn't condemn him in public, but that was still something. In spite of her socialism and racial solicitude, my mom had not completely lost her moral compass.

 

Today's "liberalism" is much different than yesteryear's. For another example, <a href=https://www.google.com/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22Irving+Howe%22&oq=%22Irving+Howe%22&gs_l=hp.3..0l10.1323.4445.1.4983.13.13.0.0.0.0.141.1401.5j8.13.0....0...1c.1.21.hp.4nK6zGLJbhA&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.49478099,d.dmg&fp=29b60037df2bac18&biw=1312&bih=818>Irving Howe (1920-1993)</a> was one of the leading socialist intellectuals in America, but shortly before his death, he wrote a scathing denunciation of multiculturalism's war on literary standards. No socialist takes such stands today.

 

A few years ago, Cohen, who is a Korean War combat veteran, ridiculed the notion that females could serve in the combat arms.

 

His age and common sense speak in two gutsy paragraphs:

 

I wish I had a solution to this problem. If I were a young black male and were stopped just on account of my appearance, I would feel violated. If the police are abusing their authority and using race as the only reason, that has got to stop. But if they ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work.

 

In the meantime, the least we can do is talk honestly about the problem. It does no one any good to merely cite the number of stop-and-frisks involving black males without citing the murder statistics as well. Citing the former and not the latter is an Orwellian exercise in political correctness. It not only censors half of the story but also suggests that racism is the sole reason for the policy. This mindlessness, like racism itself, is repugnant.

 

But they sandwich a third paragraph, in which his liberalism (or triangulation) negates that good sense:

 

The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism. They will be solved someday, but not probably with any existing programs. For want of a better word, the problem is cultural, and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.

  

 

 

Richard Cohen

Opinion Writer

 

Racism vs. reality

3872

By Richard Cohen, Published: July 15

E-mail the writer

Washington Post

 

I don't like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don't know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I'm tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.

One of those who quickly donned a hoodie was Christine Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council. Quinn was hardly a lonesome panderer. Lesser politicians joined her and, as she did, pronounced Zimmerman a criminal. "What George Zimmerman did was wrong, was a crime," Quinn said before knowing all of the facts and before the jury uncooperatively found otherwise. She was half-right. What Zimmerman did was wrong. It was not, by verdict of his peers, a crime.

 

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

Those statistics represent the justification for New York City's controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk. Still, common sense and common decency, not to mention the law, insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior. Even still, race is a factor, without a doubt. It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.

I wish I had a solution to this problem. If I were a young black male and were stopped just on account of my appearance, I would feel violated. If the police are abusing their authority and using race as the only reason, that has got to stop. But if they ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work.

The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism. They will be solved someday, but not probably with any existing programs. For want of a better word, the problem is cultural, and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.

In the meantime, the least we can do is talk honestly about the problem. It does no one any good to merely cite the number of stop-and-frisks involving black males without citing the murder statistics as well. Citing the former and not the latter is an Orwellian exercise in political correctness. It not only censors half of the story but also suggests that racism is the sole reason for the policy. This mindlessness, like racism itself, is repugnant.

Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment. Everything else is discussed — and if it isn't, there's a Dr. Phil or an Oprah saying that it should be. Crime, though, is different. It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life. We all know about it and take appropriate precaution but keep our mouths shut.

At one time, I thought Barack Obama would bring the problem into the open and remove the racist stigma. Instead, he perpetuated it. In his acclaimed Philadelphia speech on race, he cited his grandmother as "a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street."

How about the former Barry Obama? When he was a Columbia University student living on the lip of then-dangerous Harlem, did he never have the same fear?

There's no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy — the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason.

Richard Cohen

Cohen writes about politics in a weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog.

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