But racial bias can affect what seems reasonable. Individuals of all races in America perceive black people as more aggressive and dangerous than white people. Studies show that black people are seen as being physically stronger and less prone to feeling pain than people of other races, and black children are often perceived to be older than they are. When faced with an armed black target, shooters are both more likely to shoot and quicker to shoot than they are when faced with an armed white target.
.. To quote the Seventh Circuit, the federal appeals court that covers Chicago, “we do not believe that the Constitution requires the use of the least or even a less deadly alternative so long as the use of deadly force is reasonable.”
.. If a necessity standard were rigorously pursued by courts and legislatures, we would develop better nonlethal weaponry, with better training and stronger punishments for misuse.
Mandy Patinkin: Let’s Desensitize Ourselves to Terrorism
Mandy Patinkin: I’m not afraid of terrorists because I’ve been desensitized to it. (22-24 min)
Christopher Hitchen’s on George Orwell’s Social Evolution
His family background, the income of which depended on the detestable opium trade between British-ruled India and British-influenced China, had at first conditioned him to fear and despise the “locals” and the “natives.” One of the many things that made Orwell so interesting was his self-education away from such prejudices, which also included a marked dislike of the Jews. But anyone reading the early pages of these accounts and expeditions will be struck by how vividly Orwell still expressed his unmediated disgust at some of the human specimens with whom he came into contact. When joining a group of itinerant hop-pickers he is explicitly repelled by the personal characteristics of a Jew to whom he cannot bear even to give a name, characteristics which he somehow manages to identify as Jewish.
.. We can also feel, in the increasingly stubborn growth of his egalitarian and socialist principles during these years, the germination of one of the most famous lines of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”
.. He goes on, with almost cold objectivity, to note that Jews have a way of making themselves conspicuous. Again, this is not so much an expression of prejudice as a form of confrontation with it: a stage in Orwell’s own evolution. Only a few days after he expresses the misanthropic and even xenophobic view that European refugees, including Jews, secretly despise England and surreptitiously sympathize with Hitler ..
.. Reading through these meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings, however, one cannot help but be struck by the degree to which he became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. And, permanently tempted though he was by cynicism and despair, Orwell also believed in the latent possession of these faculties by those we sometimes have the nerve to call “ordinary people.”
Leftward, Ho!
Beinart argues that on race, for example, even the Republicans are accepting at least some of the left-wing critique:
Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”
Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left.
For the record, I think it’s a good thing if we work to fight police brutality and harassment of black motorists. Conservatives ought to care about those things, as matters of justice! My main objection is to the sense you get among activists that these are the worst problems facing black America, and the viewpoint that seems to remove all moral agency from African-Americans. The crazy demands by black activists on campuses make it harder for conservatives to take seriously legitimate complaints about racial injustice.