Guilt-Ridden White Celebrities

Nothing is quite so pathetic as Hollywood celebrities pretending to be moral beacons. But, it’s the spirit of the times, so celebrities have made a video wherein they all engage in Stalinist self-criticism sessions. Whatever is wrong with America, whatever is wrong with race relations in America, they (and of course the white police) are fundamentally responsible.

If America is suffering from a terminal case of stupid, then they certainly bear some responsibility.

They say that they are responsible for police brutality, so you must believe them. 

Stephen Green explains:

If celebrities ritualistically debasing themselves for the sake of a progressive cause could save the world, then the two minutes of “I Take Responsibility” you’re about to see could erase all of mankind’s sins and restore us to a state of grace.

But these are actors, so what you’re really getting is celebrities pretending to ritualistically debase themselves for the sake of moral preening, so what you’re about to see will either cause you to belly laugh or give you a belly ache.

One is struck by their vision of an America where blacks are being gunned down on the street by white police officers. Of course, this is not true-- not because it never happens, but because it only happens very, very rarely.

As for the fact that African-Americans commit most of the crimes in the country, we now know that white police and Hollywood celebrities are responsible. They are granting absolution to criminals by shifting the blame.

Heather Mac Donald testified before a Congressional Committee a few days ago. As is her wont, she explained some of the facts. One suspects that Hollywood celebrities, most of whom are probably high school dropouts, are not sufficiently intelligent to evaluate facts, but, here goes, from her testimony:

But I urge this committee to reject the proposition that law enforcement today is systemically biased. The evidence does not support that charge. Police officials and officers across the country have expressed their disgust at the chillingly callous behavior seen in the Floyd video. It is a violation of everything that the profession currently stands for. Embracing the systemic bias allegation will only lead to more lives lost to criminal violence; many of them, sadly, will be black. To move from the stomach-churning specificity of Mr. Floyd’s case to broader numbers is jarring. Nevertheless, if the charge against policing is systemic racism, we need to look at the system as a whole.

Blacks, she continues, are most likely to be crime victims. Ask yourself who is committing those crimes?

Blacks between the ages of ten and 43 die of homicide at thirteen times the rate of whites, according to the CDC. In New York City, blacks make up 73 percent of all shooting victims, though they are 23 percent of the city’s population. In Chicago in 2016, there were 4,300 shooting victims, almost all black. Among the two dozen victims under the age of 12 was a three-year-old shot on Father’s Day who is now paralyzed for life and a ten-year-old shot on Labor Day whose pancreas and spleen were ripped apart. In Minneapolis, last September, a two-year-old girl was shot in her backyard at 1 AM; another Minneapolis two-year-old, Le’Vonte King Jason Jones, was killed in broad daylight in 2016 by gang rivals of his mother’s boyfriend. These are the realities that police commanders in urban areas face daily.

Given this background most residents of these communities want a greater police presence:

The percentage of black respondents in a 2015 Roper poll who wanted more police in their community was twice as high as the percentage of white respondents who wanted more police. The activists who seek to disband police departments will have to explain to these terrified seniors and other law-abiding residents that they are just going to have to fend for themselves.

Celebrities believe that there is an epidemic of racist violence-- for which they hold themselves responsible. Is this true?

Are the police nevertheless engaging in an epidemic of racist violence, as we hear daily? They are not. For the last five years, the police have killed about 1,000 civilians a year, the majority of those victims armed or otherwise dangerous. In 2019, the police killed 235 blacks, most of them also armed or dangerous, out of 1,004 police shooting victims overall. That roughly 25 percent ratio has also remained stable. It is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of the rate at which officers encounter armed and violent suspects, a fact confirmed most recently by a 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the 75 largest U.S. counties, which is where most of the population resides, blacks constituted around 60 percent of all robbery and murder defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.

As for killings of unarmed civilians, Mac Donald points out that in 2019 the police killed 9 blacks and 19 whites:

What about unarmed victims of fatal police shootings? As of June 1, the Washington Post’s data base of fatal police shootings showed nine unarmed black victims and 19 unarmed white victims of fatal police shootings in 2019. That number of black unarmed victims is down 76 percent from 2015, when the Post began keeping its data base. The Post defines “unarmed” loosely to include suspects who have grabbed an officer’s gun or who are fleeing from a car stop with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in their vehicle. Those nine allegedly unarmed black victims represent 0.1 percent of all black homicide victims, which number about 7,500 a year—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined.

At the current historical juncture, at a time when fiction has supplanted reality in the minds of far too many, a glance at the facts is worth some attention.