Perusing The Mail, Notes & Letters From TMR's Readers

Racist whites are always challenging me, suggesting TMR doesn't have many commenters because no one agrees with it's position on race, or even likes me or blacks.

The idea that TMR has a sophisticated readership - who don't want to engage with white supremacists - never occurs to them. White supremacists can never be the problem. But they are:

"Loved it. Linked it on my blog, though I don't think anyone reads my blog, and Facebook, which people do read. I said that I received in my my email, but didn't specify from who, to keep those who regularly argue with you from dismissing it before even watching it."

And, then, there are those who claim TMR's NewAge cult work is equally impotent, though they rarely look past the blog's first page:

  "I LOVE your blog post!! THANK YOU SO Much. I say with very little pride that my head was up my ass about all this when you wrote this so many years ago.

But 2 years ago I finally woke up,…" 

Rarely am I happier than when reading those words.

Or the words of David Lott, a thoughtful man who has decided to grace TMR, once again, with more of his casual observations from deep within America's South - Go, David:

In South Carolina, if you are convicted of a felony, you can not get a drivers license. It's hard enough to get a job with a felony conviction, but since we don't have a lot of public transportation, lack of a license puts convicted felons at a great disadvantage.

Blacks are 30% of population, 69% of prison population.

Overall incarceration is 536/100,000, about the national average.

The reduced number of young black males in jobs in the community is easily observable. Black females mostly have the jobs, both menial and advanced. I eat breakfast regularly at Waffle House. I once asked the manager of the Waffle House (a very able and congenial black female) why there were so few black males working there. She said she rarely gets applications.

There was one young black man working there a few years ago who was obviously outstanding. He's gone now. He applied for and got a spot in the Norfolk Southern RR training program for train engineers. It's a very hard program to get into. I'm sure he's done great. Both black and white, the most talented young people tend to leave the community for better jobs elsewhere.

A few weeks ago we had three murders in one week in the community. We are not a big place. All black victims, all black alleged perpetrators. All young. Two of the crimes have suspects in custody, and the third is unsolved. In the same week, a 27 year old black man who had stolen a car about a month previously was spotted by police at a gas station. The cops moved in to arrest him and he took off in the car, Less than 2 minutes later he was dead after losing control of the car and hitting a tree.

All those lives ended or messed up. Such waste.

Generally the crimes for which people are prosecuted are not trumped up charges. There's plenty of white crime too. My guess is that if you sliced the data by income and education levels, you would get similar outcomes white and black. As far as I can tell, no one has done the study around here. There's a correlation between race and crime but that is not causation.

Family matters. There are strong black families in the community, even though out of wedlock births now predominate. The kids with the strong families are usually ok. The education isn't good enough, black or white. I tend to think the biggest problem is that expectations are set too low, but in truth I don't have enough knowledge of the school system to have a very good insight.

Southerners are polite. Blacks and whites have good manners. During the work day and in the public places, blacks and whites interact cordially and often warmly. But at the end of the day they tend to go separate ways. There's still a social schism, largely self imposed by both groups. If I were to ascribe group thought to each race, I'd say each thinks the other is a bit crazy. But we have reached the point where most can see persons of the other race as individuals, with individual traits. The ascription of group traits is still in decline.

But we have a long way to go on the core issues of education and economic opportunity. Progress is hard to discern sometimes. None of the kids are getting the education they need for the world that awaits them. It's worse for the black kids. We need radical change to fix that but we continue to get incremental change (and often that change is not progress, just change.) 

Whether the strong families will persist, I do not know. When the best move away, it's more of a challenge.

As to incarceration, you can look it up,...