Comments Elsewhere

There’s no real trade-off between racism and statism involved in this scandal.

As far as I can tell, pretty much all of the nastiest things that were written about black people in the early-90s newsletter articles were said in the context of articles directly calling for more aggressive and violent police tactics. Or, sometimes, directly making excuses for actual acts of police brutality–among them the police beating of Rodney King (that was in the same article as the crack about the welfare checks, and also the line that about 95% of Black men in D.C. could be considered “semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” whatever that means).

So what we’ve actually got, in the case in question, is both racism and violent statism wrapped up in one vile package.