Fox News and conservative media has been reporting that black protesters have been hunting white citizens in retaliation for the recent police shooting, including a reporter who said in a YouTube statement that he had to leave the area in fear of being killed. The question is, if these reports are true, why there has been no hate crime reporting or Justice Department investigation. There is also a sharp conflict raised over CNN’s reporting of the statements of Sylville Smith’s sister. The sharp contrast in coverage suggests either exaggeration from one side or avoidance from another. There of course should only be one side in the reporting of news, but this is the latest example of the reason why so many mistrust the media.
The riots began after the 23-year-old Sylville Smith was shot by a black patrol officer. He was armed with a stolen gun and fled from a car during a traffic stop. The loaded gun had been stolen in an earlier burglary. Smith had reportedly an extensive criminal record. The police appear to have have body cameras so we will hopefully be able to learn more about the reason for the shooting, though the officers stated that they fired after the gun was brandished or pointed at them.
Independent journalist Tim Pool received acclaim in his coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He also has reported that whites were being hunted down. While Pool expressed sympathy with the protesters, he stated “For those that are perceivably white, it is just not safe to be here. And that’s why I’m deciding to leave.”
Fox has also shown videos of groups calling for the running down of whites seen on the streets.
None of this means that all or most of the protesters are engaging in racist retaliation. However, the sharp contrast in reporting is precisely why people increasingly view media as pursuing hidden agendas or shaping the news.
Another sharp contrast is found between the Washington Times and CNN. The Washington Times has accused CNN of editing out the words of Sylville Smith’s sister who called for attacks on the suburbs. Instead, CNN reported that she called for peace and no violence.
CNN showed Sherelle Smith telling protesters: “Don’t bring the violence here and the ignorance here.” In both broadcast and Web stories, CNN framed Smith as calling for peace. However, the Washington Times said that CNN cut away before Smith yelled” “Stop burning down shit we need in our community. Take that shit to the suburbs. Burn they shit down. We need our shit. We need our weaves. I don’t wear it. But we need it.”
That is a very different take from the CNN.com article saying that Smith “condemned violence carried out in her brother’s name, saying the community needs those businesses.” More importantly, it is also obvious news if the sister of the victim is telling people to burn down the suburbs. Reporters are not supposed to shape the news. The report it. That is news. It is also legitimate to explore the history of race tensions and segregation in Milwaukee — the underling anger that erupted into the streets. Likewise, it is obviously news if there are racist retaliatory attacks and whites being chased down streets or pulled from cars. These conflicting piece raise troubling questions of how our media has diverged over preferred narratives as opposed to fully reporting all of these elements.
The ones that are doing well appear to be healthcare hubs or ones lucky enough to have defense industry jobs. If you factor out healthcare and tax-based jobs, there isn’t a whole lot left. That’s why I think it is important to focus on the government and trade policies. It seems to me the best way to fix a lot of problems is to put people to work, and not in government jobs. It’s getting to the point now where almost an entire generation has gone without meaningful employment,
Your chatter here is describing a region in your mind, not the world out here. Employment-to-population ratios for those over 16 have varied between 0.57 and 0.64 throughout the post-war era. There have been some problems with the labor market since 2008 and BO et al have made matters worse. These are problems, not an economic apocalypse.
I’ll leave you to explain what you could possibly mean by such prizes as ‘almost an entire generation has gone without meaningful employment’. I suppose you could mean that only farm and factory and construction jobs are ‘meaningful employment’, but that seems too foolish for words (and you’d have to travel back many decades to find a time when the majority of the working population was not in the service sector). Just north of 1/4 of the work force is employed in health care, custodial care, higher education, or general public employment, by the way. There actually is ‘a whole lot left’.
Art Deco, once again, from my experience only, the better paying jobs in rural WV are in coal mining. As the world is moving more away from coal mining, the stress on the population is visible. If I were Hillary Clinton, I am not sure I would come to rural WV. She seems to be universally despised there. Another problem to the urban solutions you proposed is local municipalities gambling away their future tax income for pie-in-the-sky projects. The county seat where I live is oversold and has empty retail, but has gambled future tax revenues on a retail development in a lower income section of the town (which is like one any pointing to another ant and telling him he’s smaller). Are all these poor decisions from generations of bad education going back to the 60s? It was a conscious decision by the elected leader (singular on purpose) to replace thriving industry with prisons and tourism. We’re reaping what was sewn. Another example of poor government social engineering.
In the DC area you need to have a really nice car since you will spend so much time in it. It’s amazing though, you do not have to travel far to see the income fall way off! Although it has been hard watching the economy of this region collapse due to disasterous trade policies. What were vibrant small towns are now largely empty buildings in disrepair. The ones that are doing well appear to be healthcare hubs or ones lucky enough to have defense industry jobs. If you factor out healthcare and tax-based jobs, there isn’t a whole lot left. That’s why I think it is important to focus on the government and trade policies. It seems to me the best way to fix a lot of problems is to put people to work, and not in government jobs. It’s getting to the point now where almost an entire generation has gone without meaningful employment, and successive generations will not have the desired commitment for well-paying jobs. And people need to put their money where their mouth is. How many preachers on this blog pay attention and purchase American-made products? If we can’t find something that is American made, we question if we really need to purchase it in the first place. The big loser in an economy that isn’t dependent on tax dollars is the federal government. It doesn’t necessarily make sense, but as it is now, with entitlements, the government has vast control over its population.
WV suffers from brain drain – few decent job opportunities.
Rubbish. The work force in West Virginia has proportionately more wage earners and proportionately fewer salaried employees. However, compensation per worker is quite respectable and perhaps 5% lower than national means.
How many people escape the inner city to better areas?
They don’t need to escape the inner city. The county government needs to take control of the police and restore a measure of order in the inner city. The state government needs to give county governments a franchise to operate day detention centers for incorrigibles. The state government needs to extend to school principals a franchise to remand troublesome students to day detention centers. Municipal governments need to sandblast the graffiti off the sides of buildings and rejigger their tax collections to quit promoting environmental damage via property abandonment. Municipal governments need planning, zoning, and building codes which promote a multiplicity of housing options for the impecunious. State governments need to rejigger their landlord-tenant law and eviction procedures to make slum property worth investing in.
@slohrss29
WV suffers from brain drain – few decent job opportunities. I know many W Virginians – they all miss their state deeply yet have left to work elsewhere – my husband came to SC, one brother is in Iowa and another is in California.
Even though WV has very high standards for education, they don’t seem to be enforced,
Public higher education in WVa is wretchedly hypertrophied. Don Surber says that Arch Moore during his last run as governor tried to persuade the legislature to countenance institutional closures, but no dice. In New York, an area with a population of 1.85 million which was 10% urban and 90% exurban, small town, and rural would have a sum of enrollments in public baccalaureate granting institutions around about about 30,000. A random swatch of 1.85 million people in the country at large might have enrollments at such institutions of about 42,000. There are 70,000 notionally enrolled at West Virginia institutions. How many do more than spin their wheels is a matter of conjecture.
My feeling is that it is the direct result of government-skewed project money available there that does not exist in the rest of the country.
The personal income per capital in greater Washington is about 50% above national means, similar to what it is in the counties around San Francisco Bay. About 20% of the working population are federal employees (v. 2-3% in an average locus). There are some curios about the industrial mix around DC (very little manufacturing), but it’s unremarkable in other respects. A great deal of that affluence comes with a bag of chickens*** attached: long and disagreeable commutes and high housing costs.
How many Black people live in the inner city?
Where I grew up (the Genesee Valley, a perfectly average part of the country), about 1/3 of blacks live nestled unobtrusively among the larger society. That same ratio applies in other metropolitan regions (e.g. Detroit and Washington). Again, where I grew up, about 20% of blacks living in zones where the black population congregates lived in fairly smart and quiet neighborhoods dominated by salaried employees and skilled workers. The rest lived in slums. Again, about 3/4 of the people in the slums are ordinary tertiary sector workers. The other 25% are trouble for themselves and their neighbors. This settlement pattern is, by the way, one of agglutination, not one of segregation. About 1/2 the blacks live in census block groups which are more than 47% black and about half live in census block groups which are less than 47% black. Only 13% live in block groups which are at least 80% black. Living in (disorderly) biracial neighborhoods is the order of the day.
My family actually is in the Laurel Highlands of PA, and that has always seemed a little more industrious than nearby WV. Even though WV has very high standards for education, they don’t seem to be enforced, and the educated I’ve seen in PA seems to fair a bit better. That is personal experience though. The affluence in the surrounding suburban areas of DC is amazing. My feeling is that it is the direct result of government-skewed project money available there that does not exist in the rest of the country. It’s amazing the polar difference–travel 2 miles and you feel as though you’ve stumbled into a third world village of some type. Baltimore is just plain scary now. I travel around Baltimore now, and plan to avoid even the inner harbor area.
it is important we realize that this is not an issue of race. it is one of poverty first and foremost. The issue becomes racial and racist when the victim is denied the right to state her victimization, same as we do when the gay person is attacked, or the woman is raped… we, from the outside, demand to have a say in a person’s grief, and in the case of Black people, we must deny 400 years of oppressive legacy in order to make such denial.
Personal income per capital for black Americans is about 1/3 lower than national means and about the same as what it was for non-Hispanic whites in the dark and remote age of …. 1985. Life expectancy for blacks is also about what it was for whites in 1985. In terms of purchaseable goods and services, black Americans are as well off as an ordinary bloke in Mediterranean Europe or in the provincial parts of the British Isles Britain (i.e. outside greater London and greater Dublin), The vast majority of blacks are ordinary wage earners with ordinary wager earner’s problems bar two: the schools in their neighborhoods tend to be disorderly and there’s a great deal of crime where they tend to live. These problems can be addressed, but they require means (vigorous policing and fixed standards of juvenile conduct) that poseurs such as yourself find anathema.
It seems outside the affluent suburbs (although, if you want to see government in action, go to suburban Maryland and Northern VA, it’s basically like watching Dorothy stroll into Oz…). It doesn’t appear to me from looking at this situation for 40+ years that government is helping any of this.
The DC suburbs are notable for bad urban planning and bad traffick engineering. They’re actually quite affluent and fairly tranquil. The one exception would be Prince George’s County, Md, and PG has a crime rate lower than it did 25 years ago. The restoration of order in DC and its suburbs in the last 25 years has been as profound as that effected in New York. Baltimore is actually more disorderly than it was in 1980
All I can say is this, I am thankful I have not have the life and legacy that most Black people in this country had.
Mr. Rogers wants to know if you can say ‘pharisaism’. It’s not a four-letter word.
And I am also grateful that I am not in the shoes of the sister whose brother was just gunned down.
No doubt losing her brother hurts. It’d have hurt if he got drunk and got himself killed crashing into a tree. He had a long rap sheet, ran from the police, and pointed a weapon at them. Not exactly a random stroke of bad fortune.
My father’s family existed in poverty well beyond anything seen in this blog during the 20s and 30s. With this country’s disasterous trade policies, the poverty is growing once again in these parts–the people
West Virginia’s been demographically stagnant since 1940. However, personal income per capita since the Depression has grown a wee bit faster than national means; it was 65% of the national mean during the 1929-37 business cycle and is now 79% of national mean today. About 1/3 of the difference between the state and the national mean is attributable to settlement patterns. About 45% of West Virginia’s population lives in the deep country outside metropolitan commuter belts. In an ordinary state, that share is 15%. In an ordinary state, the deep country features income levels about 23% below those in the metropolitan commuter belts. There’s just more deep country in West Virginia.
What’s odd about West Virginia is that its employment to population ratio is low. The place appears to have an unusually large lumpenproletariat – perhaps 20% of the population rather than the 6-7% you’d expect to discover. The place has a high homicide rate all else being equal, but other crime indices are about normal for a predominantly rural and small town area. So, a great many people who are a mess, but their anomie does not incorporate much criminality.
Very interesting analysis PR. My generation, who also grew up in a situation that would cause most people to gasp today, have all done very well for themselves, and I am proud of their accomplishments. An interesting side note, they have all learned self-sufficiency and have no room for government in their lives. They still hunt and garden most of their food. To them, bad government doesn’t keep the rural roads in good condition to aid local commerce.
Sad though, that generation is coming to pass and is being replaced by one that revolves around electronics and drug-based culture. Drug overdoses are epidemic, and similar to inner city situations. The pain is similar, but without the fueled tendency towards violence. And it has been noted that there is a lot of outside manipulation that has gone on with that.
I live only 2.5 hours from Baltimore and watching the demonstrations start unfold there earlier in the year, I saw the local media talking to several black men wielding baseball bats intending to protect their property and businesses from the scene. I felt they were people just like me. They were protecting everything they had. It seems outside the affluent suburbs (although, if you want to see government in action, go to suburban Maryland and Northern VA, it’s basically like watching Dorothy stroll into Oz…). It doesn’t appear to me from looking at this situation for 40+ years that government is helping any of this. And, once again, these types of stories only seek to divide us and keep us from the real issue, how to push back against an increasingly fascist government.
I see this whole situation as not a separate problem, but one that is just another facet in the failure of our elected leadership. We should focus our outrage there first.
Poor whites stay in their depressed conditions very likely for similar reasons as poor blacks stay in theirs. Lack of an education and for some, willful ignorance.
Every society larger than an agricultural village has a division of labor and every person has a certain quantum of human capital which influences his wage (or salary). About a quarter of the jobs in the economy consist of desultory tertiary sector work with out much skill or opportunity for promotion. Ideally, you’d minimize that through promoting producer co-operatives and ideally, it would be common practice for that work to be held by young people just starting out and others returning to the labor force, or largely retired, or just in need of a family income supplement. However, you’re always going to have some people who do that sort of work all their lives. Nothing you can do about that but (perhaps) make use of public policy to socialize some of the costs of certain services (medical care, long term care, schooling, and legal services), make an income floor for the elderly and disabled, and add a wage subsidy for the rest.
Poor whites stay in their depressed conditions very likely for similar reasons as poor blacks stay in theirs. Lack of an education and for some, willful ignorance.
Thomas Sowell wrote a send up of common-and-garden public schooling a while back. In the intervening years, he’s suggested a useful project might be looking under the rock that is social work. Social workers follow an educational course at least as shizzy as what’s offered at teachers’ colleges and are commonly regarded as a nuisance by people who have to work with them (nurses especially).
Po,
The problem is far more complex than boiling it down to racism. That is an injustice.
Poor whites stay in their depressed conditions very likely for similar reasons as poor blacks stay in theirs. Lack of an education and for some, willful ignorance. It is what they have always known; going off into the unknown is intimidating. That’s where their friends and families are. There is also for some an attitude that one should not rise above one’s elders; my friend’s husband has experienced that. His college education is not viewed as a source of pride for his relatives, rather it is a betrayal because he left his circumstances.
Poor nutrition and chronic stress play a part in perpetuating problems. Both interfere with executive function. Since 50% of kids below the poverty line are obese, it’s a safe bet they have inadequate nutrition (which is different than inadequate food). It is unlikely they will grow into well-nourished adults.
http://www.ohsu.edu/blogs/doernbecher/2012/08/10/3-d-health-omega-3s-and-vitamin-d3-for-well-rounded-mental-health/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16777665. (About fatty acid deficiencies and aggression)
Improving poor families’ nutrition (not just subsidizing food) will help. Education plays a huge role in food choices, so that needs to be addressed.
All of this is only one small part of the problem. Kids growing in single parent families without stable relationships: stress. Abusive discipline: stress. How to fix these problems? Who should help?
“empathy is a four letter word”
Empathy for whom?
Interesting. Although it wouldn’t be politically correct, it would be a relevant comparison/contrast to Appalachian life, especially in the time periods that Po refers to. My father’s family existed in poverty well beyond anything seen in this blog during the 20s and 30s. With this country’s disasterous trade policies, the poverty is growing once again in these parts–the people who Obama seemed confused about as to why they are angry and cling to their guns. Why not more discussion about how the inner city people seem to cling to their guns as well? Appalachian people have a high percentage of hunters, and many still provide food for their families this way. They don’t just carry the fashionable 9mm pistol that was made for one purpose only. I find this strange.
Yes, for all too many commenters here, empathy is a four letter word.
They can’t even count.