{"id":24523,"date":"2014-03-05T09:16:18","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T14:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24523"},"modified":"2014-03-05T09:16:18","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T14:16:18","slug":"president-obamas-my-brothers-keeper-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/03\/05\/president-obamas-my-brothers-keeper-initiative\/","title":{"rendered":"President Obama’s “My Brother\u2019s Keeper” initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonah Goldberg<\/a> thinks that Obama’s proposed “My Brother\u2019s Keeper” should pass constitutional muster despite grumbling from the usual suspects:<\/p>\n

The statistics are gloomy and familiar: One out of 15 black men is behind bars; one out of three can expect to be incarcerated at some point in his life.<\/p>\n

The simplistic talk about how this is all the result of white racism misses the scope and nature of the problem. The vast majority of interracial violent crime is black on white. But most violent crime is actually intra-racial (i.e., black on black or white on white). Still, blacks are far more likely to die from homicide; half of murder victims are black, which may partly explain why black men in prison have a higher life expectancy than black men out of prison. And this leaves out all of the challenges \u2014 educational, economic, etc. \u2014 facing black men that don\u2019t show up in crime statistics.<\/p>\n

Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, also thinks the program is unconstitutional because there is no \u201ccompelling\u201d government interest here: \u201cIt may be that a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos are at-risk, but many are not, and many whites, Asians and others are. This is just another kind of \u2018profiling.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes and no. Obviously there are at-risk youth of all races, but the problems facing young black men are so disproportionate, the difference of degree becomes a difference in kind. Yet, I also think Clegg is obviously right that this is another kind of profiling.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an intriguing double standard that tangles up the Right and the Left. We\u2019re told it is outrageous for government to assume that a young black male (in some contexts) is more likely to commit a crime; we\u2019re also told that government should target young black men for help because they are more likely to commit crimes. Most liberals hate law-enforcement profiling but support \u2014 for want of a better term \u2014 social-justice profiling. For conservatives, it\u2019s vice versa (though Clegg opposes both kinds of profiling, it\u2019s worth noting). Yet the empirical arguments for positive and negative profiling are the same: The plight of young black men is different.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonah Goldberg thinks that Obama’s proposed “My Brother\u2019s Keeper” should pass constitutional muster despite grumbling from the usual suspects: The statistics are gloomy and familiar: One out of 15 black men is behind bars; one out of three can expect to be incarcerated at some point in his life. The simplistic talk about how this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,13],"tags":[158,715,343,99],"class_list":["post-24523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-constitution","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6nx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24523"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24524,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24523\/revisions\/24524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}