August 17, 2016
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Source: Bigstock
The celebrated Black Lives Matter movement chalked up another riot over the weekend, this time in Milwaukee.
A black cop shot an armed black criminal and much passive-voice news reporting ensued. The New York Times wrote, for example:
Like many of his neighbors, Dominic A. Lebourgeois was in disbelief on Sunday at the level of violence that descended on his Sherman Park neighborhood the previous evening.
In other words, several hundred blacks burned automobiles and looted buildings, including a cell phone store. A beauty salon was stripped of its hair extensions and then torched.
(This wasn”t even the first riot in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood this summer. In late June riot police had to drive off 100 youths throwing rocks.)
The dead man, Sylville Smith, was not an upstanding citizen, as his social-media presence demonstrated. He had been arrested nine times since 2011. He had been charged with witness intimidation but had been released due to the witness being properly intimidated.
But that didn”t matter to the rioters, who identified with Smith. To calm tensions, the dead man’s sister went before the cameras and called for peace in the black community in a memorable speech:
Burnin” down shit ain”t going to help nothin”! Y”all burnin” down shit we need in our community. Take that shit to the suburbs. Burn that shit down! We need our shit! We need our weaves. I don”t wear it. But we need it.
The respectable press edited the sister’s lament that “We need our weaves“ down to “Don”t bring violence here.”
The mainstream media quickly followed up with many think pieces trying to explain exactly what nastiness the seemingly nice white people of Wisconsin had committed that forces Milwaukee blacks to behave so badly. (As we all know, blacks don”t have agency or free will, so it would be inappropriate to ask Wisconsin blacks to choose to behave less destructively.)
The New York Times rose to the challenge by explaining, “Racial Violence in Milwaukee Was Decades in the Making, Residents Say.” The article implied that the latest riot is due to the Milwaukee city council delaying passing a fair-housing law until only 48 years ago.
In reality, the current round of blacks behaving badly in Milwaukee over the past eighteen months is due to the Ferguson Effect that has also driven up murders in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in St. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago (where, by the way, another 52 people were shot last weekend, nine fatally).
The number of homicides in Milwaukee jumped 69 percent in 2015 due to agitation in the aftermath of the police killing of a mentally retarded black man named Dontre Hamilton. The Obama administration announced last December that its Civil Rights Division would spend two years monitoring the Milwaukee police department for signs of bias. As usual in cities where the administration says it must intervene to protect black bodies from white police violence, local blacks responded to federal nagging of the cops by shooting each other in historic numbers.
But the Ferguson Effect only explains the short-term disaster in Wisconsin.
What about the long term? If you follow social-science statistics, you”ll eventually notice that there’s something not quite right with Wisconsin blacks.
For instance, that Wisconsin blacks usually score the lowest in the nation on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress tests of public school students. And the white-black gap on the NAEP is larger in Wisconsin than anywhere other than Washington, D.C.
Moreover, the black-white imprisonment ratio in Wisconsin is an extraordinarily high 11.5 to 1. That’s the second-highest of the 50 states, behind only New Jersey (12.2 to 1) and just ahead of Iowa (11.1), Minnesota (11.0), and Vermont (10.5).
In contrast, the most equal black-white incarceration ratio is in Hawaii (2.4), where most blacks are either in the military or are Barack Obama-like exotics, followed by Southern states such as Mississippi (3.0), Georgia (3.2), Alabama (3.3), and Kentucky (3.3).
And blacks in Wisconsin are 9.0 times more likely than the overall population to use welfare, the worst ratio in the country.
Normally, the press would blame the problems of Wisconsin blacks on racist Republican rednecks. Yet Wisconsin is a moderately liberal Northern state that hasn”t voted for a Republican presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan’s landslide in 1984.
