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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
08:31
Colin Kaepernick, Betsy Ross, and What the Data Really Say
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We begin from a complaint by the prominent MSNB Hee Haw contributor Michael Eric Dyson.
What about the argument that some have made, this is PC culture run amok, if you will?
If Nike wants to put this flag on their shoe, why are people so upset about it?
Yeah, because, you know, words matter, symbols matter too.
Why don't we wear a swastika for July 4th?
Because, I don't know, it makes a difference.
The cross burning on somebody's lawn.
Why don't we just have a Nike, you know, celebration of the cross?
Well, because those symbols are symbols of hate.
What is Mr.
Michael Eric Dyson talking about?
He's talking about Nike's decision to pull a Betsy Ross flag shoe that they had planned on rolling out on the 4th of July.
Why did they pull it?
Well, it turns out Colin Kaepernick, who has some sort of relationship with Nike, complained.
You remember Colin Kaepernick?
Ultimately, it's to bring awareness and make people realize what's really going on in this country.
There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust, people aren't being held accountable for, and that's something that needs to change.
That's something that this country stands for freedom, liberty, justice for all, and it's not happening for all right now.
And Colin Kaepernick is echoing the complaints of Jesse Williams, the actor who said this at the BET Awards show.
What we've been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow managed to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day.
Let's look at the data.
Do you know that there is something called the Police Public Contact Survey that the DOJ does every three years?
They ask 60,000 Americans, did you have a contact with the police last year?
If the answer is yes, they ask, what's your race?
What's your ethnicity?
What's your sex?
What kind of contact did you have?
Were you abused?
Were you verbally abused?
Were you physically abused?
They analyze that data.
They cannot find any institutional, structural, systemic racism.
The data are not there.
In a study on the use of force, two researchers from Michigan State and Arizona State put together this study.
It's called, Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force?
And here's what they say.
We benchmark two years of fatal shooting data on 16 crime rate estimates.
When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-police disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects.
Exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings.
For unarmed shootings or misidentification shootings, data are too uncertain to be conclusive.
End of quote.
And then there's that study from the Harvard economist whose name is Roland Fryer.
He happens to be black.
Here's what he found.
On the most extreme use of force officer-involved shootings, we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.
End of quote.
And then there's a national victim of crime survey.
Where victims of crime are asked to name the race of their assailant, whether the assailant has been caught or not.
And it turns out about 35% of the victims name a black assailant, and about 35% or so of the people caught are black.
Now, unless people are lying about their assailant, saying that they're really black when they were white, then blacks are not being over-arrested.
The data simply do not support the allegations made by Colin Kaepernick and made by Jesse Williams.
Nike apparently listened to Colin Kaepernick, who made this allegation about the police.
I'm not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.
To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.
There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.
And as I said, the data just do not support the allegation.
So why is Nike listening to Colin Kaepernick about the Betsy Ross flag?
A couple of factoids about the Betsy Ross flag.
He is upset because the flag has 13 stars on it, which represent one star for each one of the original colonies, and all the colonies had slavery.
And Colin Kaepernick is right about that.
But if he's upset about the Betsy Ross flag, he's upset about the flag.
Our flag has 13 stripes.
Each stripe represents one of the original 13 colonies.
And the current flag has 50 stars on it.
Each one of the stars is representing one of the states.
But 13 of those states are of the original 13 colonies which had slavery.
So if Colin Kaepernick is upset with the Betsy Ross flag, the man is upset with the flag.
And as conservative colonist Michael Medved points out, Betsy Ross is a particularly bad person to malign.
Why?
She was a Quaker.
The Quakers were abolitionists.
And Pennsylvania, her state, was the first state to abolish slavery.
She's not a good target.
By the way, if the Betsy Ross flag is racist, why did this gentleman use not one but two big ones during his second inauguration?
Look at this photo.
One more thing about Colin Kaepernick's anti-police stuff is getting people killed.
Officers were killed in New York too, three officers killed in Baton Rouge, five officers killed in Dallas, Texas, all by three black men who were motivated because of the perception of police brutality.
So, not only is Colin Kaepernick wrong, he is getting people killed.
Finally, as the Dallas police chief once said, be part of the solution.
Don't be part of the problem.
We're hiring.
If you think the police officers are bad, if you think the officers are racist, why don't you get involved?
Join the police force.
Help to turn it around.
Be part of the solution.
We're asking cops to do too much in this country.
We are.
We're just asking us to do too much.
Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve it.
Not enough mental health funding.
Let the cop handle it.
Not enough drug addiction funding.
Let's give it to the cops.
Here in Dallas, we've got a loose dog problem.
Let's have the cops chase loose dogs.
Schools fail.
Give it to the cops.
70% of the African-American community is being raised by single women.
Let's give it to the cops to solve that as well.
That's too much to ask.
Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.
And I just ask for other parts of our democracy, along with the free press, to help us serve your communities.
Don't be a part of the problem.
We're hiring.
We're hiring.
Get off that protest line and put an application in.
And we'll put you in your neighborhood and we will help you resolve some of the problems you're protesting about.
I have a suggestion for Nike.
Let's call him Colin Kaepernick's.
And the last thing you want to do is get caught between Professor Michael Eric Dyson and a thesaurus.
Listen to some of this.
To begin by lamenting the erosion, morally speaking, of the poorer masses of black people is to miss the degree to which The structural inequities of American culture reproduce the pathology of poverty.
What?
Mothers mired in poverty, and both of them received the calumny and the slander of this culture.
Within the large panoply of American identities, the most ready and apt metaphor for the suspicion to which we are subject.
There's a cultural backdrop.
Black humanity has been suspected from the beginning of our sojourn in American society.
The demons that are bespeaking, if you will, a negative impact on America.
Barack Obama's body, his black body has marked the presidency.
The history of a black man grace its rostrum, so to speak, for two terms.
The cerebral abilities and the intellectual acuity and the reason we're living in a country that is so...
I'm Larry Elder.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Larry Elder Show for Epoch Times.
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