Bennett flap proves we need to talk about race

Richard Davis:

Current PC codes expressly forbid the mentioning of blacks and criminality together, as mainstream journalists would tell you if they were honest. They help maintain the codes. Blacks themselves won’t even mention the two in the same sentence, which might help explain why the violent crime rate for blacks remains so high. But we can’t talk about that.

The Cincinnati Enquirer editorialized on Monday that Bennett’s comments were racist, adding, “It apparently didn't occur to him to say that crime could be suppressed by eliminating poverty, or educational disadvantages, or disease. No, the thought that he came up with was eliminating crime by eliminating a race.”

This excerpt displays the proper PC usage when discussing crime. That is 1) don’t mention blacks and crime together, 2) exaggerate white racist attitudes, and 3) always reference poverty (education is fine, too, though I’m a little puzzled by what diseases they’re referring to. Kleptomania?).

Poverty causes crime, period, case closed, and whites are solely responsible for both creating and not alleviating black poverty, the most notable white responsible being George Bush. That crime has gone up in the black community as poverty has gone down, that whites have transferred trillions of dollars to blacks, that more than twice as many whites as blacks are poor and at least an equal number of Hispanics are too and yet their violent crime rates … well, that’s all wandering outside the parameters.

Note what the Enquirer didn’t cite -- what many consider the principal-though-now-unmentionable source of the high rate of black crime -- illegitimacy and the dissolution of the black family. One could also mention welfare dependency, which helped destroy the family, community and personal values, and the absence of male moral guidance in the community -- that is, if one could mention them, which one can’t.

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