White Privilege Trumps Black Lives and Civil Rights–the Myth Exposed

November 6, 2021 / Posted in  ACLU, Alaska Natives, Asian-Americans, Black Americans, Blog, Bruce Bartman, Crystal L. Mason-Hobbs, Donald Trump, Eric Garner, GOP, Latinos, Mark Hoekstra, Native Americans, Police use of force, Shawn Parcells, Stephen Vickers, Thomas, Trump Donald J, Voter Fraud, white supremacy racism, Youngkin

There is a growing racism in American society and American politics. Today the United States has a thriving, if somewhat tenuous, black middle class. By conventional measures of income, education, or occupation at least a third of African Americans can be described as middle class, as compared with about half of whites. That has change from the early 1960s, when blacks enjoyed the “perverse equality” of almost uniform poverty in which even the best-off blacks could seldom pass on their status to their children.

Jenna Ryan Frisco TX racist realtor Jan 6 (NZ Herald)

Recent evidence confirms affluent African Americans’ greater mistrust of white society. More college-educated blacks than black high school dropouts believe that it is true or might be true that “the government deliberately investigates black elected officials in order to discredit them,” that “the government deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people,” and the continuing lie of Ronald Reagan that “the virus which causes AIDS was deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people.”¹ It  becoming worse. With the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately killing black Americans, and police are reacting violently against protesters for civil rights.² White privilege is ascending³ and engulfs nearly all the GOP and its candidates.⁴

Reality check

Over 45% of all adult Americans refuse to address–or correct it⁵ with 75% of all adult Blacks thinking public attention to race is a good thing, with a majority of Asian American (64%) and Hispanic (59%) adults also view this positively, with Democrats viewing increased attention to  US history of racism be a positive factor in changing opinions on race, while the majority of Republicans think it is bad with 26% thinking it is “very bad.”⁵ Most people agree that  the hallmarks of American democracy – opportunity, freedom, and prosperity – have been largely reserved for white people through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct result of structural racism: the historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white supremacy.⁷ This is abundantly clear in rural Virginia and among white evangelical christians and their support for white supremacy and white nationalism.⁸

Dylann Roof mass murder racist

Mass murderers who are inspired by white nationalism, from Anders Breivik in Norway and Dylann Roof in South Carolina to the Christchurch killer in New Zealand, echo Camus’ catchphrases in their writings. The vagueness of these catchphrases allows murderously minded individuals to apply the idea against anyone they may see as an outsider, including Muslims, Sikhs, Latinos, African Americans, Jews, and left-wing Norwegian activists. Fox News TV hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham regularly promote these ideas.⁹

Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin hugs his family including his wife Suzanne (2R) and son Thomas  (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

With Glenn Youngkin, governor-elect of Virginia, angrily denounced news media for exposing his seventeen year-old son Thomas Youngkin attempted to vote twice in the 2021 election for his father, claiming he wanted to “really wanted to vote for his father”¹⁰ but was rebuffed at the pole, claiming it was an innocent mistake,¹¹ but his hypocrisy was exposed by the New York Times.¹²

Thomas Youngkin

Glenn  Youngkin is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and sends Thomas to Georgetown Preparatory School that encourages “Ignatian Spirituality”.¹³ It teaches civics, history, and ethics that Thomas conveniently forgot. Thomas, however, excels in basketball and modifying facts to suit his particular and peculiar practices like his father. This hypocrisy¹⁴ has been current for too long.

Crystal Mason (NY Times photo)

The Texas woman, Crystal Mason, an African-American woman who was convicted of attempting to cast a vote while on federal supervised release during the 2016 United States presidential election is appealing her conviction of voting illegally in the 2016 election as she was never told of the restrictions on the franchise to vote in Texas and was convicted three months later. Unbeknownst to her, Texas considered Crystal ineligible to vote because, at the time, she was on federal supervised release after serving almost three years in prison for tax fraud. No one ever told her that she wasn’t allowed to vote until her federal supervised release was over.¹⁵ A lawyer for her says the Texas system “guts the entire system” of justice if a defendant is not white and Republican.¹⁶ On March 31, 2021 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed to consider Mason’s appeal.¹⁷

Letter sent to Crystal Mason

Unlike Thomas Youngkin, whose ballot was rejected and allowed to walk free, Crystal L. Mason-Hobbs was sent a registered letter of the rejection by Stephen Vickers, Voter Registrar, or Tarrant County, Texas and was approached by the police six months later and arrested that day. Ken Mays, who supervised Crystal’s probation officer, appeared in court that day. He admitted to the court that his office had not warned Crystal that she couldn’t vote while on federal supervised release, according to the State of Texas. In fact, he testified that it was not a part of standard procedure to share that information. “That’s just not something we do,” he told the courtroom.

Bruce Bartman (Delaware County D.A.’s office photo)

Yet, white privilege taking center state, a Pennsylvania man, Bruce Bartman, 70, won probation for casting his dead mother’s vote in 2020–although his mother had been dead for twelve years. Bartman even attempted to vote a second time for Trump on October 28–he even attempted to vote for his dead mother-in-law–for Trump.¹⁸ District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said “This criminal investigation and prosecution by my office should serve as a roadmap for meaningful reform for the Pennsylvania legislature and officials reviewing our voter systems. Our office has done what it can to ensure our elections are both secure and accessible but the next fight is in Harrisburg. To those reviewing voter systems, I say, ‘Remove failed systems, not ballot boxes.'” Trump and his allies filed at least 50 legal claims across the country that alleged voter fraud caused by improper mail-in ballots, absentee ballots counted incorrectly, improper access for poll watchers, and foreign interference — all of which were denied. Two separate lawsuits in Pennsylvania, including one that reached the Supreme Court, were rejected after no evidence of widespread fraud was discovered. “Rather than earning national attention for efforts to restrict accessibility to voting, address the breakdown in the online voter registration systems that this defendant exploited to vote for a deceased relative.”

Shawn Parcells

Shawn Parcells, 42, the unqualified autopsy “professor” who conducted a review of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and became the “source” for “exonerating” white police of killing black people.¹⁹ He also was deemed guilty of violating state law by performing autopsies without a pathologist present. The violations of state law occurred in 2014 and 2015. Parcells has worked with a number of county offices²⁰ to offer cut-rate and often botched death investigations, despite admitting to having no medical training of any kind. He has introduced himself as “Professor,” despite not having any claim to that title, and has said, “If they want to think I’m a doctor, that’s their issue.”²¹ Shawn Parcells has made multiple false statements about his education and career. He has claimed to hold jobs that he has never held and to have earned academic degrees that he never earned.²² “To take out organs and to cut open a body, you don’t need to be a pathologist,” he told CNN.²² He has never been accredited as an expert in forensics or anything.²⁴ Parcells now wants a job at an online college in Missouri!²⁵ On November 3, 2021, Parcells was convicted on six criminal charges linked to autopsies he performed in Wabaunsee County, Missouri from 2014 and 2015; he was found guilty in Topeka, Kansas on three counts of felony theft and three counts of misdemeanor desecration of bodies.²⁶

In law enforcement equality is seldom a factor in police actions. White police are seldom prosecuted for their attacks on black people. White police are frequently accused, with evidence, of extorting money (or sex or other things) from black people and use violence against black people who file complaints or attempt to sue. Black men are 2.5 times more likely to be assaulted or killed by a white police officer than are white men. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups. Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men.²⁷ Men, more often than women, risk being killed by law enforcement in all racial and ethnic studies.

Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and gender (National Academy of Sciences of the USA)

Since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed black people nationwide. The majority of police officer have been white.²⁸ The highest levels of inequality in mortality risk are experienced by black men. Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men. Black women are about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are white women. Although risks are estimated with less precision for American Indian/Alaska Native men and women than for other groups, we show that they face a higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do whites. American Indian men are between 1.2 and 1.7 times more likely to be killed by police than are white men, and American Indian women are between 1.1 and 2.1 times more likely to be killed by police than are white women. Latino men are between 1.3 and 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are white men, but Latina women are between 12% and 23% less likely to be killed by police than are white women. Both Asian/Pacific Islander men and women are more than 50% less likely to be killed by police than are white men and women, respectively.²⁹

Police and racism

Mark Hoekstra, an economist at Texas A&M University in College Station, has attempted to decipher the role of race in police officers’ use of force, by comparing responses to emergency calls. Based on information from more than two million 911 calls in two US cities, he concluded that white officers dispatched to Black neighborhoods fired their guns five times as often as Black officers dispatched for similar calls to the same neighborhoods.³⁰ It is equally true if a suspected violator has a “African sounding name.”³¹

NOTES