So, that’s the story from the previous post. Here’s the first paragraph:
Congressional Democrats blasted former Education Secretary William Bennett on Thursday for saying that aborting “every black baby in this country” would reduce the crime rate, and demanded their Republican counterparts do the same.
Now, Bennett followed that with, “That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down,” so I suppose he doesn’t necessarily justify genocide, which is good, but the remark is still so throughly racist that it’s hard for me to comprehend that this guy is basically saying that to reduce crime, all we need to do is stop black people from reproducing. It’s just *insane*.
It’s bizarre, though – I mean, sure, we’ve got a long history of incredibly racist/sexist/homophobic remarks coming from people that label themselves “conservatives,” but it really seems like right now, the whole right-wing “conservative” political machine is coming apart at the seams. Frist *and* DeLay both under investigation, Abramoff being tied to just about everyone, the whole Plame case once again moving forward… is there anyone in this administration who’s *not* going to be touched by some measure of corruption, open bigotry, or otherwise? Are there *any* people in this administration who are even marginally respectable? Seriously.
I’m not talking about Republicans as a whole – I’m talking about the power players in this administration. Anyone who’s not a.) corrupt, b.) openly racist/homophobic/sexist, or c.) completely incompetant? How can these people remain in power?
I flipped on talk radio the day after this happened, apparently after being completely unplugged from news, and the host was just finishing introducing the audio clip. The exchange started up and, without knowing what I was listening to, my first thought was that it was Phil Donahue (they kinda sound alike, I guess).
When I hear him say the quote in question, I literally talked back to the radio. I think my outburst was something along the lines of, “He did NOT just say that. Wow.” Then he backtracks a little by saying that would be reprehensible and we could never condone such a thing. It was really a shocking thing to hear someone say out loud on national radio, even if it was in hypothetical tones.
I got to thinking about it afterward and the conversation came out of a discussion about the book “Freakenomics” that attributes the drop in the crime rate to the increase in abortions over the last thirty years. Essentially saying that poor, underprivilaged, single mothers just killed thier children and didn’t allow them to grow and savage society.
While Bennets comments are unquestionably crazy and racist, I can’t believe there isn’t, or wasn’t an outcry about the book. Isn’t it saying close to the same thing in more PC terms? Or is just saying that poor people are criminals? Or that children of single mothers are violent terrors on society?
From what I can garner from trusted reviews, Freakonimics was an interesting book in that connected a lot of little dots that people are not used to thinking about, but suffered from a lot of problems in that some of the lines it drew were waaaay too simplified and could not fit the real world statistics. In some cases, he failed to do concrete research and relied on old, false memes.
This is only on the section that covers names of minorities, but it’s worth reading. Name-onomics and Names, race, and economists.