Re “An Author in L.A. vs. Bloomberg in New York”
[img]1410|left|Michelle Alexander||no_popup[/img]Has Michelle Alexander – author, professor, lawyer – just stumbled into the racial crime of our time?
Or is she a beautiful, dazzlingly articulate, shrewdly seductive orator slicker than deer guts on a doorknob, a smoothly practicing rabble rouser in a thirsty, unswerving quest for cheap applause lines?
On Friday morning at the Urban Affairs Forum at the African American Museum in Exposition Park, Ms. Alexander was a commanding, overpowering presence for 60 consecutive minutes. Never pausing, never stuttering, she purported to examine a vague, shakily stitched thesis about the mass incarceration of black and brown men, drawn from her latest book, “The New Jim Crow.”
They are the doomed victims of the cursed cop habit of racial profiling, Ms. Alexander asserted.
Mostly she drowned her audience in a welter of crisscrossing numbers that were painfully short of scholarship, context or screed-free analysis.
Upon reflection, her overtly shiny presentation was as contrived as a television studio wrestling match.
A veteran practitioner of the devious art of cultural polarization and racial victimization, Ms. Alexander presented 100 percent of her subjects as victims of a racist justice system in a race-obsessed country. Almost none of her subjects was guilty.
Her audience was about 250 well-dressed guests. Virtually on cue, they cheered with uncommon vigor at her hundred or more emotion-lathered punchlines, utterly without context. Her Background
Her credentials may help to explain her artfully nuanced penchant for incitement. A onetime ACLU civil rights lawyer in the Bay Area and a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, the 44-year-old Ms. Alexander for the last seven years has been a law professor at Ohio State University. That is not all. Unsurprisingly, there is a major racial component. After winning a George Soros Justice Fellowship in 2005, she gained appointment to the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity within the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State.
Kirwan’s self-described mission maintains that it “fosters critical and creative thinking about concepts of race and ethnicity, and works to create a just and inclusive society, where all people and communities have an opportunity to succeed.”
Ms. Alexander’s manipulative talk, uniformly lacking in critical thinking, frequently included the catch-phrase “black and brown men.” Hispanics, however, were reduced to a straw man role. They were emphatically irrelevant to her argument that black men – nearly all innocent – are victims of America’s newest race-driven caste system.
Helpless victimization was the iron thread carefully stoked throughout her talk.
One of Ms. Alexander’s favorite rhetorical devices was to point out that more black men are behind bars today than were slaves in the 19th century.
She may be correct.
Present data, however, suggests she is doing show business rather than scholarship, reaching for a phony, crowd-thrilling point.
We are told that based on the most recent data, 846,000 black men were incarcerated in 2008. In 1860, the U.S. Census reported just under 4 million slaves, meaning Ms. Alexander only was wrong by a factor of about 80 percent.
Do Statistics Prove a Case?
Like a mechanical pitching machine that never wears out, the 44-year-old Ms. Alexander relentlessly kept firing unattached numbers that were shaped purely to incite rather than inform her listeners.
Not by accident was her speech 99 percent emotion-based. The 1 percent presumed to be factual was so widely scattered as to defy monitoring.
Without a sniff of skepticism, the crowd seemed to be starving for her cleverly calculated mass incarceration message.
Her talk was designed specifically to drive eager, unsuspecting partisans into a fit of arm-waving despair.
Like a gourmet dish with just-right seasoning, the impressively coiffed Ms. Alexander sprinkled her hollow but hype-happy theory – that black and brown men are unfairly targeted by police agencies coast-to-coast – with just enough numbers to fit her debatable thesis and keep the masses upset.
(To be continued)
