When silly notions lead to civilizational breakdown

If there's any subject that exposes the prevalence of knuckle-headedness in post-American society, it's race.

And, just so LITD is on the record as acknowledging that residual bigotry among some white knuckleheads in society's remote corners exists, let's start by calling out those idiot caucasians who still traffic in infantile generalizations.

Okay, with that out of the way, the next message goes out to everybody from the BLM movement to black-studies academics to "diversity" trainers to entertainment-industry loudmouths like Jesse Williams and Beyonce.

Here you go: You could knock it off right now and the vast, vast majority of people of all races who are getting along just fine would have one less background irritant in their lives, but you'd have to find something worthwhile to do with your lives.

But because you won't, we get situations like last night's carnage in Dallas, which ostensibly is a response to the shootings by police of a Minnesota man who had been pulled over and a Louisiana man selling CDs outside a convenience store.

Investigations in each case are underway. No good can come of second-guessing what conclusions might result.

And in a population as large as that of al the law-enforcement officers in the United States, there is surely a statistical sampling of some size that is going to reflect bigotry, racism, or mere preconceived generalizations about black Americans.

But it appears to be quite small, judging by the way police shootings break down along racial lines:

The kinds of shootings that launched the Black Lives Matter movement — white police officers killing unarmed black men — represent “less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings.” The[Washington] Post [which did an exhaustive study of the matter] does its best to hype the racial injustice of this statistic, proclaiming that while “black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year.” But that claim is misleading on a number of counts.

Crime doesn’t break down on neat, proportionate demographic lines. Criminals are overwhelmingly male (police killed very few women this year, but no one argues that law enforcement is sexist), and violent criminals are disproportionately black. In fact, blacks “commit homicide at close to eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.” Even worse, “among males between the ages of 14 and 17, the interracial homicide commission gap is nearly tenfold.” In 2014, for example, while black Americans constituted only about 13 percent of the population, they represented a majority of the homicide and robbery arrests. 82 percent of all gun deaths in the black community are from homicide. For whites, 77 percent of gun deaths are suicides.

Given these disturbing disparities, no rational person would expect police shootings to precisely track with demographics. Police follow crime, and they tend to operate in high-crime areas. It would be alarming if there were statistically significant racial variations in the use of force even after adjusting for crime rate, but the Post’s report doesn’t make this distinction. Even the “hugely disproportionate” ratio — “3 in 5” — of blacks and Hispanics shot to death after “exhibiting less threatening behavior” than brandishing a gun isn’t out of line with violent-crime rates.

And skittishness on the part of America's police is undoubtedly a factor. Heather MacDonald presents Chicago as a case study:

Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions. In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period. The violence is spilling over from the city’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the downtown business district; Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies.

The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawal from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated the national airwaves and political discourse, from the White House on down. In response, cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities around the country are backing off pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the resulting vacuum. (An early and influential Ferguson-effect denier has now changed his mind: in a June 2016 study for the National Institute of Justice, Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri–St. Louis concedes that the 2015 homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was “real and nearly unprecedented.” “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he told the Guardian.)

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel warned in October 2015 that officers were going “fetal,” as shootings in the city skyrocketed. But 2016 has brought an even sharper reduction in proactive enforcement. Devastating failures in Chicago’s leadership after a horrific police shooting and an ill-considered pact between the American Civil Liberties Union and the police are driving that reduction. Residents of Chicago’s high-crime areas are paying the price.

The scourge is moving from the south and west sides of the city to areas near downtown.

Clearly, it's nearly all gang-related, and, as we know, gang proliferation has such root causes as fatherlessness and drugs.

And this actually gets me back to my original point: You don't have to be a certain race to not do hard drugs and to interact with the opposite gender in a manner characterized by respect and courtship.

Anybody can do it.

 Wonky statistical studies and deep sociological inquires conducted with furrowed brow may flesh out details of the problem, but the solution is really quite simple: Knock it off and conduct your life in ways that have been proven to work.

But as I also said at the outset, the grievance industry would quickly wither, and there's a basic human tendency to bristle at the prospect of one's occupation becoming obsolete.

So, in race as in so many areas of life, we are beset with chaos, fear, danger and misery because we give credence to narratives with little or no basis in reality.