Maybe We Could Build This Really Big Wall...

For the past couple weeks, the PD has been covering how white people have been getting really upset and demanding action on a very pressing issue: black kids are walking around the Loop and being all scary and shit. Between the articles themselves and the plentiful comments, it's hard to pick what ridiculous racism to highlight. But one thing really caught my attention and seems worth discussing on the internet: there is a commonly held belief among people who are scared by black kids that black kids should not be allowed to go to the same places that white people go to. Metrolink gets rather absurdly roped into this, and people end up essentially arguing for the deliberate creation of racial ghettos and the racial segregation of the St. Louis area.

First, though, let me address the obviously absurd comment of Blair Stiles in this article. Blair is 21 years old, and she lives in south St. Louis. Blair is young and lives in the city. Yet Blair tells the PD, with no apparent irony or self-awareness whatsoever, that "crowds of young, urban youth [redundancy sic]" are "pretty intimidating." By any reasonable (i.e. non-racialized) interpretation of the term, Blair Stiles is, herself, an urban youth. So unless Blair bizarrely felt like telling the newspaper that she is intimidated by her own peers, Blair means something by "urban youth" other than "young people who live in the city." Now, Blair probably doesn't mean "niggers," but she most definitely means "black kids," and when she's telling us how much they intimidate her with their mere presence, is there really much of a distinction there? I think Blair's comment is the most important one in all of the articles because it lets us really see the feelings that are at the heart of this issue: THERE ARE BLACK KIDS RUNNING FREE ON THE LOOP. And that makes white folks really uncomfortable!

So. Black kids - and we are talking about black kids here, even if only Blair Stiles, and even she indirectly, will come right out and say it - are showing up in the Loop in big groups, and this is bothering the patrons of the local businesses. After all, no one wants to be intimidated by the presence of "urban youths" while they're trying to see art-house movies, buy Wilco records, and eat frozen yogurt. Business owners don't want their patrons to be bothered because then they stop being patrons and business owners stop making money. Notice the dichotomy that emerges: we have the kids, and we have the patrons. One business owner makes it explicit in the article: "[The 'urban youth'] don't buy anything. They just ruin the experience for people who do come here to shop and support the loop." I have no idea if this is true or not, and I doubt whether anyone else really does either, but this whole discussion takes place in a context where it's assumed that the kids in question aren't spending any money in the Loop, just wandering around and harassing the good, American, paying consumers. This is a problem the consumers and the merchants want solved. And solving this problem means eliminating black kids from the Loop.

Two main ways to make this happen come up over and over again in the comment section and the articles themselves: a police crackdown on black kids on the Loop and making it more difficult for black kids to get to the Loop in the first place. The police crackdown obviously supports an idea I've pushed on this blog before: that racists are generally very authoritarian. The second solution is more bothersome to me (at least for today). It's basically an argument that says St. Louis is not segregated enough. If we can just keep the black kids in the ghettos on the North Side, we'll all be better off because we'll be able to go and see Rascal Flatts at the Pageant without having to feel that terrible feeling that comes with seeing black kids out and about.

MrSmith comes right out and says it: black kids shouldn't be allowed on the Loop.

This is so insane. I assume there are other areas of the city that black kids shouldn't be allowed in, according to MrSmith. And I suppose we'd have to install checkpoints at the entrances to these neighborhoods in order to make sure that "black youths were stopped from comming [sic] to" our new, pristine white-only neighborhoods. The existence of these checkpoints would raise all sorts of interesting logistical issues, most of which will be familiar to anyone who has thought critically about the Jim Crow laws of the past: Who decides whether or not a kid is black? Is it just up to a police officer to decide, based on how the kid looks? What about kids who appear racially ambiguous? Would you have to present papers proving your race? Do bi-racial kids get to come in? What if we draw a line around a new, white-only neighborhood and discover that a black family lives there? Did we get rid of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act? Can white people still go to "black" neighborhoods? Will there be Footlockers in the white neighborhoods?

I mean, wow. This is a person, in 2011, expressly arguing for the segregation of public areas! I'm sure that in the Jim Crow era there were plenty of streets a black person would not have been comfortable or safe walking down, but were there ever any that they were explicitly banned from? "Sorry, boy, can't come in here. This is the Loop, and its streets are just for white folks." Yeesh.

Some of the slightly more tactful racist motherfuckers who want to keep black kids from bothering the nice white consumers have found a convenient entity on which to blame the problem: Metrolink.

Here is just a sample of the comments that blame Metrolink for the presence of scary "urban youths" on the Loop, and / or explicitly argue that Metrolink is a bad thing because it allows black people to get out of the ghetto:

I wish I knew what business intheloop owns, so that I could go loiter in front of it:

See, if only we didn't have public transit, the hoodlums would be stuck in the hood, and nice white folks would be able to go to the mall and walk down the streets without ever having to acknowledge that there was a ghetto in their city. The ghetto isn't a problem in and of itself, after all, it's only when people get out of the ghetto and scare me that its existence becomes a problem. So the solution is emphatically not to get rid of the ghetto. No, what we need to do is get rid of Metrolink and further ghettoize the north side. Maybe if we built a really big wall like Pat Buchannan wants to do with the Mexicans...

Where Is the PD's Racism Threshold?

I'm working on a longer post on this topic, but something struck me as I was reading through the comments on the various PD articles about the roving bands of "urban youth" terrorizing the white folks who just want some peace and quiet on the loop.

This thread is closed to further comments because there were too many racist comments being made. Here, look:

There are other comments in that thread that the editor has removed because of racism. The editorial foot has been put down. Certain things are not acceptable and won't be allowed to stand on the PD's website.

What the editors let fly, though, makes me terrified of one day actually managing to read one of the things they delete. In the comments section of another article about the "Black Kids On The Loop!!!" controversey, this comment was allowed to remain:

I mean, Jesus. We all know what "thugs" really means, and I'm just not sure there is anything more obviously and explicitly racist than literally advocating shooting a particular group of people in the streets.

What could the racists who got the first thread shut down have possibly said to get their comments removed if that one is apparently acceptable?

I'm Back, Suckas

A guilty verdict was handed down today in the trial of Todd Shepard, so he's looking at the death penalty for shooting a white cop in U. City a few years ago. Shepard, who's biracial but identifies as black, sounds like a god damn kook, and claims that he shot the officer, Sgt. Michael King in order to start some kind of revolution. It's also worth noting that he did it at least partly in retribution for the killing of his then-girlfriend, Annette Green, who was shot by a police officer during a drug raid on her home. Sgt. King is, at least indirectly, another victim of the war on drugs.

So, a black guy killed a white cop for explicitly racial reasons: an awful situation, sure to be made worse by our friends and neighbors commenting on the PD's website. I entered the "Discussion" with trepidation. I don't know whether it's been heavily edited or not, but the tone was far tamer than I was expecting. There are plenty of barbarians calling for Shepard's immediate murder or torture (one commenter suggests that Shepard be involuntarily used for parts[!]). Mostly the thread is a discussion of whether or not this should be have been prosecuted as a hate crime. The sensible commenters have noted that the prosecutor is seeking the death penalty as it is, so using Missouri's hate crime law, which just serves to increase punishments, wouldn't have done any practical good.

I actually think there's something to the argument that it would have been worth it to call this a hate crime for the sake of calling it a hate crime. Shepard's testimony left little doubt that he was motivated to commit this brutal murder by his victim's race. Commenters are predictably complaining that hate crimes only seem to apply to crimes where a member of the majority victimizes a member of the minority. I obviously condemn all racism, which is why I sympathize with the idea of calling this a hate crime. However, doing so might legitimize the idea that so many white racists seem to have the white people are being persecuted by the hateful thugs. The fact is, white racism is systemic and most hate crimes serve to reinforce the systemic advantage enjoyed by straight white males. Flamboyantly gay men get tied to fence posts. Black men who step out of line get dragged behind pick-up trucks. Women who dress too provocatively get raped. These things send the message that non-conformity with the norms of heterosexual white male supremacy are punished. That's what Shepard's crime - as awful and racially motivated as it was - is missing. So I'm ambivalent about whether this should be labelled a hate crime.

There's some solid hate on display in the comment thread though. One guy thinks he's sussed out why white people face so much discrimination at the hands of black folks:

I think. I can't really tell which direction the irony in this comment is going. The whole thing reads as sarcastic, but referring to "us poor tortured white people" makes it sound like he's doing something I might, i.e. sarcastically lamenting the plight of the white man in today's America. But the ironic assertion that blacks want to kill those poor white people on account of they have several ostensibly desirable traits makes me really think Folio is a racist.

As of when I captured this comment to preserve it for posterity, it had been on the PD's page for about an hour and a half:

I don't know if it will be thrown down the memory hole soon, but it probably ought to be, right? Most of the racist comments you find on the PD site aren't this... blatant. Normally you have to couch your racism in statistics you invented out of thin air. Just asserting ridiculous things about black people doesn't usually fly. We'll see what happens. In any case, holy shit that's racist!

Update: Changed the second comment to actually look like the one I wanted. Oops. Post should make sense now.

Update 2: The holy squad cars comment is now gone. Glad I got it!

I Do Not Think This Movie Means What You Think it Means.

Somebody shot at the police on the North Side. That's a terrible situation. Leave it to the commenters on the PD website to make the worst of it.

Charles P. thinks everyone who runs from the police should be shot with a machine gun. Really:

He also, of course, calls for an expansion of the police department. At least he doesn't call for sending in the National Guard, which is a disturbingly frequent suggestion by conservative PD commenters. You know, the principled, small-government non-racists.

I like to think that stltodaybunny read my previous post on code words, and is trying to send me a message when he / she talks about "PUNKS":

Bring in the National Guard because the niggers have no self respect!

But the discussion thread's winner-so-far is very obviously Captain Spaulding, who appears to have seen District 9, but completely missed the point of its unsubtle commentary on Apartheid:

So there's the good Captain, watching District 9 and thinking to himself "Yeah! Awesome! Lock up those prawns!" I thought the anti-Apartheid message was laid on pretty thick, myself (setting the movie in South Africa? Really?), but I guess it wasn't thick enough for those who are sympathetic to the idea of quarantining an entire population in the first place.

It's also interesting that the white people who abandoned the city in the previous decades have adopted the Tea Party "take our country back" rhetoric to pretend that blacks have stolen it. Just like they used ACORN to steal the White House. Maybe Sarah Palin can hold a rally at the Edward Jones Dome where everyone can dress up like para-military tough guys and show those commies / blacks / libruls that we're going to take the Second Amendment into our own hands. Or, you know, send in the guard while we watch on TV.

Welcome, Racists...

Well.

So a racist who can read found this little corner of the internet. He posted a thread about my post about "thug" as a code word on a hideous racist forum, which I refuse to link to here. Click on through to see the comments his friends posted. They are quite proud of themselves for posting comments, and they should be. They brought the rhetorical PAIN. Or teh STUPID. Whichever. They're bragging at their forum about leaving "choice words," although they're unclear about what the benefit of doing so might be. One speculates that I'll delete the post soon, but that's not going to happen. I wouldn't want all of my (several!) regular readers to miss out on the horrible, horrible things these lowlifes have to say. That said, I have deleted a few comments.

In the interest of pretending like there is a productive debate to be had with avowed racists, I'm going to come up with a few commenting rules, which I reserve the right to never follow. But here's what I was thinking as I was deleting comments just now:

1. Don't link to offensive websites. I'm not going to drive traffic to your filthy forums, however minimal a boost in traffic you might receive by linking on my site. If the link is in the body of your comment, I'll delete that. If your handle links to something offensive, all evidence of your comment having ever happened goes into the ether.

2. Don't incite violence or say other things that could potentially, in my wildest imagination, expose me to liability.

3. Don't just post for posting's sake. Flooding the site with "choice words" for the purpose of creating a flood is stupid and obnoxious and pointless - I'm just gonna delete them. I know that's really what went on in the code words thread, but if an actual conversation ever happens here, comments that don't contribute will get axed.

4. Don't post anything that will make me want to take your comment down. Stupidity is probably okay (just see the code words thread for proof of that), but plenty of other stuff won't be.

5. I would say "Be nice," since that's just kinda something I think people should do, but that will be too frequently ignored to be enforced.

I might fisk some of the racist bullshit in the coming days. I might not. But, in any case, welcome, racists. It will be fun to make fun of you and sad to know you exist.

Update: I closed the comments on that thread because it was really starting to piss me off and I think everyone gets the idea.

The PD Trolls Its Commenters

Oh my god you guys.

The PD is officially trolling its own racist commenters.

Also, there is an argument going on in the comments about who floats better. To wit:

It all starts when Dick_Butcher (seriously? Is this Lorena Bobbit's screen name?) gets a bright idea:

jrjohnso has a sense of humor about the whole thing:

Dick's all BAM! Science up in yo grill!

flifishun lol's:

happypatb actually read the article:

Real Talk from a trio of posters:

jrjohnso is WAY too logical for an stltoday.com commenter:

Dick misses pat's peace offering, and he takes his ball and goes home (also: he went to grad school, motherfuckers!):

rahda4 might not have read the rest of the debate. He just throws out some weird quote from a person no one else had heard of:

Okay, so pat didn't actually read the article. He / She also says pointless stuff:

jr is not ready to let it go just because Dick stomped out of the thread:

sandisland misses the point and says there just might be something to this whole "buoyancy" thing:

It's insane.

Also, there are people in that thread who are, insistently and without irony, defending slavery. I know.

Their Lives Don't Matter

One person was killed - i.e. is now dead - and many more were wounded Sunday night in a series of shootings in St. Louis. Many people and their families are in tremendous physical and emotional pain right now because of what happened . One human being lost his life. Countless others lost a loved one or had to watch their loved ones suffer. This story is sad. How to solve the problem of violence in St. Louis is up for debate, but anyone who reads the story with a shred of humanity in his or her heart, I think, would have to feel something. Not the delightful commenters on the story about the shootings at stltoday.com, though. In a word, ugh.

bassmaster asks a rhetorical question (which he ends with a period) about leadership:

And he answers it by asserting that leadership is finding a way to use armed forces to "wipe out these thugs."(We all remember what "thug" really means, right?) Death sentences all around! Live next to a "thug?" Well, you're either with us or against us, so unless you welcome the troops like liberators (to show your loyalty, you could tear down a statue!), you can expect to get killed too. After all, their lives don't matter.

The ugly sentiment continues in a disgusting streak of four comments (stltoday's new "old comments at the bottom" default is really annoying, btw). Snag, mr.westcounty, Farik Al Akeem, and ramsrevolution each demonstrates his odious hatred for his fellow human beings with his comment in this string:

There seems to be some disagreement here about whether a "show of force" is needed or whether the police should "redeploy" elsewhere and guard the people whose lives are worth protecting. There is also a semantic difference here between the terrible people who want to lock the "thugs" up in a dungeon and the terrible people who want them to be killed. They certainly agree on one thing though: their lives don't matter. They're "animals" who should be put away for life. Violence in a neighborhood where black folks live? "Almost no problem with" it. "Why is this of any concern?" Their lives don't matter.

Their lives matter so little, in fact, that we should actively seek to end them by, apparently, building walls along arbitrarily drawn lines (What constitutes "the North Side"? Is it about the density of the black population? A certain high enough "thugs" per square mile ratio?) and creating some sort of apocalyptic scenario in the areas of the city we have deemed unfit for continued habitation. Build a wall and distribute guns. They didn't even do that in District 9.

It goes on. bign thinks he's being hilarious:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ITS FUNNY BECAUSE THE BLACK PEOPLE THEY DIED. Their lives don't matter.

TheUnderboss and our old friend drumming umpire have back-to-back comments that really take the cake in the "I don't give a goddamn about human life" department:

drumming umpire, TheUnderboss 12 july.egg

TU has decided to import the new right-wing OMG! du jour and blather on about the "New Black Panthers" and how they want to kill babies. Those militant "thugs" are "the ones to look out for." Who gives a damn about blacks killing blacks. Their lives don't matter.

And, really, what can I say about DU? He seems to have decided that not only don't the lives of black folks on the North Side matter, but neither do the lives of any of those silly liberals who would be stupid enough to live within a nuclear-bomb's-kill-zone of them (incidentally, read the whole thread for some "interesting" perspectives on why living in the City is teh sux or teh roxorz). They're shooting each other? Nuke the bastards.

The high school policy debaters I judged this year liked to strengthen their side by making the case that their opponents' plan - which always involved increasing some sort of social services - would SURELY lead to nuclear war. That line of reasoning is obviously specious, but perhaps I didn't give it enough credit. I like to think that nuclear annihilation is mostly off the table. Most people, I like to tell myself, are completely against using nuclear weapons in response to pretty much anything but an attack that was itself nuclear. But reading bullshit like du's - even though I don't think he would actually pull the lever to drop the bomb on the North Side - makes me realize just how much nuking the bastards is on the table for many, many people in our ridiculous country. I remember hearing idiots talk about dropping nuclear bombs on "The Middle East" after 9/11. As long as we have the warheads, we'll have the idiots who want to use them. Reading even a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that people deserve to die in a mushroom cloud because of their proximity to the black part of town reminds me of that fact, and it depresses me.

Our lives don't matter.