How Outrage is Manufactured

You can tell that it's a day ending in "Y" because someone from the Slum Times wrote about something racial....and Alden Loury is really bad at it. He begins by breaking the law (apologies that this is behind the Slum Times paywall - you have to pay to be called a racist we suppose):

• The last time I was pulled over by a police officer was a couple of years ago on DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Seeing two other drivers who were pulled over, it dawned on me that I probably needed to slow down, as I was driving probably a good 10 miles per hour above the speed limit.

  Then, I saw the flashing lights behind me. It was my turn to pull over.

  As traffic stops go, this one was fairly routine. The officer was cordial. He told me I was speeding and asked for my license. After returning from his squad car, he told me to slow down. Painless, except for the speeding ticket he gave me.

Note that he doesn't tell us anything about the officer....except he was cordial. We can probably interpret that as "professional" but who knows? But based on this single event, a column is born of racial injustice!

• I hate getting tickets. Who doesn’t? But I was more curious than angry. Were there police waiting to catch motorists on the North Side? To find out, I headed north, purposely driving the speed limit to get a sense of how many others were over the limit.

  Practically everybody passed me with ease from 39th Street on the South Side all the way to Hollywood Drive on the North Side. Yet, not a police car in sight.

  I didn’t see another police car until I got back to the South Side, where a motorist was pulled over not far from where I’d gotten my ticket.

  I wasn’t surprised by the discrepancy, but I brushed it off. Maybe the cops would be catching speeders on the North Side the next day.

Or maybe a chronically undermanned police department with a unit that has maybe four cars up on LSD happened to be  working the south side rotation that day?

Nah....gotta be racial profiling!

• I was wrong. Racial profiling of drivers is alive and well in Illinois.

  For months this year, I worked on a project with colleagues from WBEZ and journalists with the Investigative Project on Race and Equity to document the widening racial disparities in traffic stops in Illinois. Two stories were published by WBEZ and the Sun-Times.

  We found Black motorists were the subjects of nearly 31% of all traffic stops in Illinois last year, even though just 14% of the state’s adult population is Black. In 2004, Black motorists were the subjects of about 17% of traffic stops statewide. Several Black men recounted the many times they’d been pulled over by police. Some shared details of tense encounters.

WBEZ is a bunch of commie fabulists who cherry pick data and bend numbers over backwards until they scream for mercy. But this is ridiculous - black motorists are 14% of the population and 17% of statewide stops? That's likely what's called the "margin of error."

And those "details of tense encounters"? Loury cites exactly.....zero. He just threw out that "scary narrative" without citing anything.

• The statistics and stories were all too familiar for me. I’ve been stopped by police at least a dozen times, mostly on the South Side and usually because I forgot to turn on my headlights or a tail light was out. Most of those encounters have stuck with me. During my first traffic stop, two state troopers searched every inch of my car — under the seats, in between the seat cushions, even unloading my trunk. One trooper even asked if I had anything on me that I didn’t want him to find.
  

So he admits he got stopped for.....compliance violations! Not for driving while black. Amazing.And the trooper stop - no context whatsoever. Did he give consent? He doesn't deny it. He's manufacturing outrage.

And then the "SCARY CPD!"

• There are those who say Chicago police target Black and Latino drivers to look for more serious crimes, like guns or drugs. But last year, collectively, Black motorists were stopped by Chicago police four times more often than whites, even though there are more white adults in the city than Black.

"...those who say..." Well that's definitive of racial profiling. There are those who say the election was stolen from Trump - we're supposed to believe you but not him? Why? As for stopping blacks at four times the rate of whites, we could hold a seminar on why that might be - economic inability to maintain a street legal car, failure of the schools (and social promotion) in classes to teach proper driving in the CPS system, lack of a two-parent household that might be able to take a teen out for practice sessions, etc.

Then he goes off the rails, undercutting the racial profiling angle without even knowing it:

• And practically everywhere I shop in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, I see bulletproof glass, employees checking my bags before I exit or merchandise in locked cases. In some stores, buying batteries, detergent, deodorant and even a $3 tube of toothpaste requires shoppers to get a clerk to unlock a case — and the employee takes the merchandise to the check-out counter until you’re done shopping.

  Recently, I couldn’t bring myself to ring a bell for customer assistance in the toothpaste aisle. I just left. I’ll buy it someplace else, I told myself. I am not a threat or a thief. Yet, everywhere I turn, there’s someone communicating to me, in some way, that I am. That other Black people are as well.

Um.....where are these stores located? Black neighborhoods? So there aren't any (or very few) white, brown or Asian people around? Who exactly are the shop owners worried about "liberating" the goods on the shelves? 

• It’s degrading. It’s dehumanizing. And it’s exhausting.

Kind of like your writing. The demand for racism far outstrips the supply, so softballs like these have to make sure the grievance machine has plenty of fuel. But as we pointed out at the start of this post, it's behind the paywall, and the audience he's trying to reach isn't paying to read it.