MaDD Blogger

An open letter to Bill Bennett

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."
William J. Bennett

The following is copy of the email that I sent to Bill Bennett this morning after hearing the following clip:

Dear Mr. Bennett,
  While watching Don Imus's radio program this morning I was disturbed to learn of your comments on the Salem Radio Network that took place on the 28th of this month. At first I thought I was mistaken and the clip was from David Duke's daily radio broadcast but alas no, there is no doubt that you sir, a former Secretary of Education with a doctorate no less are indeed the origin of said statement.

Unlike so many others I am not shocked to hear that you feel this way in fact I applaud you for actually stating it on the public airwaves. You see sir in order for racism to truly end in our lifetime the racists, the bigots, the elitist, and those who are simply ill informed must come out of their crawl spaces and expose themselves to the light so that the long unspoken truths about racism and bigotry in this country can finally be debated in earnest.

I say this not only as a black man but as a member of your party that you have done damage sir, not only to yourself but to the already fragile race relations that are still freshly wounded in Katrina's wake. No matter how many eventual Mea Culpas you make (and I suspect that the press coverage and a few calls and emails to your show sponsors will force your hand and cause you to utter such a statement) you will forever be branded a racist, a relic of the less progressive times that our party has known. The pressure will be immense for an apology of some kind on your part if for no other reason than to simply "make it go away". I for one urge you not to make that statement and believe that your initial instincts not to offer what would be in truth an insincere apology is the more appropriate choice.

I ask you not to apologize not because I agree with what you said. In fact I found that after listening to the sheer ease with which the words flowed from your lips that there is no redemption in you or the statement itself and no spin that can make it so. I say that because it is clear from listening to the actual statement, (which I encourage everyone who reads this letter to do) that you truly meant what you said. There was no pause, no moment of reflection, it was simply pure thought and therefore even more vile.

You do not have a history of making racial statements in this country but clearly you have been infected as have millions of others Americans of all races. Racism is a social disease but it is not impossible to cure though it is indeed a bitter pill to swallow. I do agree that we truly need to talk more openly about these things in order to make race relations better but it's a long term process one that might not end in either of our lifetimes.

Antonio D. Brice
Owner and Webmaster
Justblogme.com

Time for a good ole fashioned Lynching

{ 7:03 AM, October 1, 2005 } { Posted by The Inquisitor }

The gentlemen may be right from the scientific point of view given the right amount of data and the employment of the correct analytical methods.

What we ought to concern ourselves with is the general socio-economic circumstances that might have led to such a correlation being true and seek to eradicate them.

These remarks, in themselves, are not ‘racist’ but indicative of the racism and class deprivation that might render the correlation true.
People and social 'realities' are products of systems. In the final analysis, it is the system that requires lynching.


http://the-heretic.blogspot.com

Untitled Comment

{ 7:06 AM, October 1, 2005 } { Posted by The Inquisitor }

btw. just a comment on the 'about me' clip. I think it's fantastic. Just a suggestion. Perhaps the clip, if you did it yourself, could be doubled and the second copy placed after the first clip and reversed. That way, the movement would be uninterrupted. Just a thought.

You made some good points...

{ 6:06 AM, October 2, 2005 } { Posted by maddhatt }

But what I'm concerned about is the fact that it plays into the old racists dogma that says that if there were no blacks in this country crime would be non-existent. These people have all kinds of facts and figures that prove that when countries are virtually "all white" there is little to no crime.

I have seen on both David Duke's website and Stormfront.org posts that tend to suggest that it is America's "melting pot" mentality that leads to all of the crime in this country and that if all the blacks, Jews and all other minorities would simply pack up and leave then everything would become peaceful again.

I listened to Bill Bennett's radio program on Friday as he was talking about his statement and the lefts attempts to have his program removed from the airwaves. Let me make a couple of points that I don't think were made clear from my open letter post:

1. I don't believe that Bill Bennett is a racist. I actually enjoyed listening to his program very much.

2. Despite point one I am concerned that Mr. Bennett actually believes his statement. I am not suggesting that Bill Bennett approves of aborting every black child in this country, he clearly does not. Be he has argued that while he would find the act morally repugnant, based on current socio-economic realities within the black community, that if the actions mentioned above were taken the crime rate of this country would indeed go down.

That's what I take offense too the fact that Bennett says "Hey this would be completely racist and morally wrong...but it WOULD work!". I have heard whites suggest in defending Bennett's statement that blacks should be more offended that what he said is the truth rather than with the statement itself. I am concerned that many white people actually believe this statement outright rather than examining the culture of America as a whole as well as the fact that the poor of all races have always commmited crimes against the rich. The "have nots" have always taken from the "haves".

Glad you like my avatar by the way. I considered doing what you suggested a while back but the avatar already has so many frames that it makes the graphic already quite large.

Untitled Comment

{ 8:36 AM, October 2, 2005 } { Posted by The Inquisitor }

"These people have all kinds of facts and figures that prove that when countries are virtually "all white" there is little to no crime."


Thank you for considering the view i forwarded. Most rare indeed. I see your problem is not entirely with Benny but with how his statements might be construed. I have to concur with yourself when i consider the general intellectual climate.

As for these 'studies'. I would like to know about these 'all-white' countries. Such findings may be correlations which does not imply a cause-effect relationship. For instance, the existence of an adequate welfare system and other cultural factors may inhibit the incidence of criminality amongst the lower classes. Thus, the infusion of a 'black' community into such a state of affairs may not see a significant shift in crime rate. Hence, to compare such a country with one where the above or other factors may be dissimilar is not an entirely valid undertaking.

Most importantly, the findings from these studies may not be valid if comparisons are not made WITHIN these countries rather then between them. Additionally, if these studies are of populations within the same country, the ensuing findings - i.e. findings from one period where the community is 'all-white' and another where it is 'mixed' withing the SAME country - can only be relative valid if the socio-economic conditions are relatively similar from one period to another when the studies were conducted.

'Crimininality' amongst the lower and other classes are a function of a host of socio-economic factors and evolve at various stages. The studies you mentioned seem highly suspicious to me. Unfortunately, such findings might tend to have much currency in America as the people there, as evidenced by their cultural produce, seem to be acutely ethno/egocentric in their perceptions. Such deficiencies are necessary for serving as the foundations upon which such findings might be constructed.

http://the-heretic.blogspot.com

Indeed...

{ 3:38 AM, October 3, 2005 } { Posted by maddhatt }

I feel that this is in fact "Junk Social Science" at it's most dangerous. On Davidduke.com there is a post called "The Dark Side of Diversity". It happens to show a photo of a woman from Sweden who apparently had been raped and badly beaten by a "group" of African immigrants. The basic premise is that as more "Non-Europeans" (in other words people who aren't white) have immigrated into Sweden crimes against it's white citizens have increased.

Most of time I would be highly reluctant to give credence to a story without looking into the facts further but because David Duke is such a highly visible "racist" I'd wager that if for no other reason than the constant public scrutiny he and his posts receive that he makes sure that he gets his facts correct before he posts anything. That being said I'm willing to accept as fact that a "group" of African immigrants raped a Swedish woman and beat another woman who was in her company nearly to death, where the argument breaks down is the use of "generic facts" and the lack of pure hard analytical data that shows how many of these so called "new crimes" (i.e crimes that had a low percentage of occurance among whites or were virtually unheard of before the so called boom in immigration) were actually caused by immigrants. Also how many of these offenders were criminals before immigrating to Sweden? The piece also fails to mention the most obvious point, that whites in Sweden having a 90 percent majority population are statisticly most likely to be victims of any crimes committed nationwide just by sheer numbers.

I also saw some very interesting posts at stormfront.org mentioning virtually anything under the sun but with a racial slant. What's scary about these posts is the fact that these people aren't you're average beer swillin' rednecks. I saw tons of posts from people who were clearly educated, articulate people and yet they were just as racists as any people I've ever heard of. It would be a lot easier to simply denounce these people as ignorant if they weren't educated. Educated whites who believe this rubbish can influence others to share these same beliefs. They'll be the ones doing the hiring and the firing in our places of work literal wolves in sheeps clothing. This is why I feel like Bill Bennett did some serious damage with his statement, because while he denounced the act of aborting all black babies itself he appears to at least believe that the crime rate in this country would go down if the act were carried to fruition. This belief is an extremely dangerous one which I plan on arguing in a new piece I'm working on.