Discussion: Conservatives Convinced They 'Debunked' NYT Writer's Story About His Son

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Discussion for article #232687

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How many times do conservatives need to hear it?

It is not a “White vs Black” issue. It is a “Cops vs Black” issue.

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This matters…why?

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The story Blow told about his son, a Yale student, being stopped mainly for being black almost made me cry. The son was coming out the Yale library, the police had received word of a crime nearby, so why not grab the nearest black kid. The boy had been coached by his father on how to respond and Blow remains furious. The conservatives who are trying to debunk this story suck at being human…

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Elaborate on[quote=“bd2999, post:3, topic:16161, full:true”]
This matters…why?
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To my mind, it’s just another example of young black men being harassed by police, told to get down on the ground simply because they’re black. And you say?

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It matters because brain-dead morons like Nolte want to keep pushing the myth of “post-racial America.” Blow never, ever intimated the race of the officer who detained his son; and it really doesn’t make a lick of a difference. If the writers at Breitbart’s Mausoleum want to pretend that a non-white officer can’t behave in just as blind and bigoted manner as a white policeman, they are sadly misinformed. Good for Mr. Blow for defending himself and his son. A disgusting attack by prejudiced, ignorant people. No surprise.

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I keep trying to believe that the people who call themselves “conservative” nowadays aren’t simply stupid. But they make that a very, very difficult task.

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Like we needed more proof that conservatives are racists who just. don’t. fucking. get. it.

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Can they get any stupider? Next one of them will be complaining the FBI is hacking her laptop for Obama…

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Well, call me NOT shocked that conservatives don’t get it!

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Indeed, Blow never intimated the race of the officer, and it’s not clear that he knew the race of the officer. (Maybe he asked his son, and maybe his son told him, but it wasn’t part of Blow’s objection.)

As with so many of these conservative diatribes, they inject the question of race and then scream “racist”!.

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Will all the parents of black children who wouldn’t be upset if their child was killed by a black police officer please stand up?

Thank you. I see you back there, Ben Carson. You can sit down now.

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What does “debunk” mean in this context? That it didn’t happen? That it didn’t happen the way it was described? Wow.

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BLACks and LIbtarDs jUst maKE this UP. IF It ISN’t racIALIStics WHY hasn’t I Been PROfiled by A BLAck cOP???

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You has beend PROfiled. Sketched, 2oo.

Oops, I forgot the tophat.

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I do not like Breitbart (may its founder be roasting on a spit in hell as I write) or any of the other Conservative pr outfits that masquerade as news sources, but I think the omission was wrong. Like it or not, the picture in the mind was not of a generic non-racial police officer detaining a black youth, but of a white officer detaining one, fueling a narrative that a bog part of the problem is racism by white cops, rather than the reputation of young black men in general. By the way, anyone who want to talk about this subject should read Jill Leovy’s excellent new book, “Ghettoside,” which credibly posits that a large problem black communities have is not too much law enforcement, but not enough effective law enforcement.

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Unself-conscious racism by the right is so bizarre.

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There seems to be an entire cottage industry on the right in regards to these kinds of accounts of race relations between young black men and the police. These rightwing groups don’t get it because they purposely support keeping the status quo, where young black men (and women too) are being institutionally singled out for discrimination. It serves their hateful agenda. Look at all the wingnut publications that jumped on this story in unison and then attacked Charles Blow along with others they deem “anarchists and race hustlers”. Its of similar character to that whole ‘reverse-racism’ argument they’ve been pushing since the late 70’s following advances under the Civil Rights Act. It brings them out of the woodwork like cockroaches. Time for the rest of us to shine a light on it and make them scurry. They are truly beneath contempt.

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I agree. I was very moved by Blow’s column and assumed from the entire piece that the police officer was white. I don’t know how any other conclusion could have been reasonably drawn from it. So, by not mentioning that the officer was black, I think Blow not only left himself open to the criticism he has gotten, but missed an opportunity to discuss the complexities of the problem. For those TPM commenters who are saying that the issue “was never about black and white, but about cops and black teenagers,” I must have been following a different Fergason than they were, where an enormous amount of the coverage was about a town with a big minority population, but only a tiny handful of minority officers.

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I agree with you, but I think we should be careful here about getting the facts straight. The police received word of the crimes (thefts) and had a description of the suspect, which at some level fit that of his son. The police were justified in stopping him and questioning him, but not in pulling out a gun and forcing him to the ground. Race comes into the issue, not because he was stopped, but because it seems highly unlikely that a white Yale student would have been treated that way if the suspect had been described as white.

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