First, some quick throat clearing. This post is a bit outside my wheelhouse- I don’t typically try to call people out. That said, after reading this article and a bit of my own internal debate, I decided I could keep this pretty narrowly focused and still make my point, all without getting personal and calling people names.<\/p>\n
So here goes.<\/p>\n
At Outside the Beltway<\/a>, a political blog one of the author’s has written an brief article related to race. Doug Mataconis analyzes an essay by Victor Davis Hanson<\/a> and all but concludes Hanson is a racist. First, here’s the excerpt from Hanson’s article (the accused) that Mr. Mataconis highlights:<\/p>\n First, let me say that my father was a lifelong Democrat. He had helped to establish a local junior college aimed at providing vocational education for at-risk minorities, and as a hands-on administrator he found himself on some occasions in a physical altercation with a disaffected student. In middle age, he and my mother once were parking their car on a visit to San Francisco when they were suddenly surrounded by several African-American teens. When confronted with their demands, he offered to give the thieves all his cash if they would leave him and my mother alone. Thankfully they took his cash and left.<\/p>\n I think that experience \u2014 and others \u2014 is why he once advised me, “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.<\/strong>” Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young \u2014 or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.<\/p>\n It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment \u2014 while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle \u2014 while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Here’s the relevant part of Mr. Mataconis’ analysis:<\/p>\n So, because Hanson’s parents had one bad experience with young black males in San Francisco and he had another in East Palo Alto some years later, he’s decided that it makes sense to teach his children to inherently distrust every young black male that they encounter<\/strong>. But, of course, he’s not being racist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Here’s the problem, Mr. Hanson didn’t decided to teach his children to “inherently distrust every young black male that they encounter.” At least, not based on what he’s written in the article. Also, Mr. Hanson didn’t have one bad experience in Palo Alto, he claims to have had 5. He cites two explicitly and then goes on to state that he could cite 3 more. Those are in the third paragraph of the excerpt from Mr. Hanson’s article.<\/p>\n As to the other accusation, Mr. Hanson implies something much more narrow than what Mr. Mataconis accuses him of. Mr. Hanson implies, he does not provide a quote of the actual lecture to his sons, that he advised his sons to “be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” That’s quite clearly not “every young black male they encounter.” I’ve highlighted the source quotes above. <\/p>\n Mr. Mataconis goes on to make some reasonable and well-worn points about race and so forth. While I generally agree with those points, his stepping off point and analysis is, I think to any rational evaluation, hyperbolic at best. If he wants to argue that Mr. Hanson shouldn’t be giving his sons advice based on Mr. Hanson’s own personal experiences in this instance, then he needs to go a lot further than he went here. If he wants to argue that Mr. Hanson is a racist, again, he needs to go a lot further than he went here. Dictionary.com defines racism as follows:<\/p>\n a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Mr. Hanson pretty clearly has not gone to that length here. Frankly, I don’t see how one gets there from here without a lot of sketchy supposition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Doug Mataconis needs to read his source material a little closer\n
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\n before jumping to conclusions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}