I Read Sheriff Clarke's 'Black Lies Matter' Book So You Don't Have To - By Erin Gloria Ryan
President Trump took time out during Harvey to tweet about his buddys book. From his theories on jails to Trayvon Martins supposed death wish, its all high-octane garbage.
ERIN GLORIA RYAN
08.29.17 1:00 AM ET
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Clarkes book opens with an assertion of his own blackness, but spends the rest of the pages blaming other black people for being on the losing end of hundreds of years of inequality. When liberals assume anything about him, its because he is black. But when liberals do anything that upsets him, its because they are either black or capitulating to the desired agenda of Black Lives Matter, which he calls a hate group whose goal is anarchy.
Despite preaching personal responsibility, nothing bad that has befallen Sheriff Clarke is his fault. He blames the media for fabricating rumors of domestic violence accusations made against him by his wife (and chastises a reporter for failing to resign after she asked him a question about it in a press conference). He blames Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown for their own deaths at the hands of police, suggesting that if those three human beings had not wanted to die, perhaps they should have thought about that before they chose to disobey law enforcement.
Obeying and disobeying is a sticky theme throughout Clarkes book. He takes great pains to explain why the most prominent victims of police violence deserved it. Michael Brown robbed a convenience store and was walking toward a police officer, hence, death. Trayvon Martin was strong, and mad, hence, death. Eric Garland was fat and shouldnt have been selling cigarettes, hence, death. None of the legal consequences for any of these behaviors should be death. But Clarke (or, lets be honest, his ghostwriter) does their best to tell the reader that it should be.
Clarkes bizarrely brutal philosophy extends into his expanded justification for why he ran the Milwaukee county prisons with such cruelty, why he subjected his charges to inhumane conditions and inedible food. Prison shouldnt be fun, he writes. People shouldnt want to come back to prison. It should be okay for a prison warden to take mattresses away from inmates at 8 am so they cant sleep in; otherwise, how are they going to get jobs when theyre out (he also notes that warehouse jobs are ideal for former inmates, which means that the schedule to which he was trying to force his charges to adhere didnt really make sense). He writes that it should be okay for wardens to deprive inmates of food that gives any pleasure, to cut jobs training programs and GED programs. Prison should be unenjoyable. Nobody should want to come back.
In the same chapter, Clarke brags about a program that he engineered (or that he adapted from an existing program in Michigan), one that taught inmates life skills that they could use outside of prison. Why his idea was better than the programs that already existed but that he uprooted he never convincingly says. What he does say is how proud he was of one particular inmate who went through his life skills training program who wrote him a letter about how much he wished he could stay in jail and further benefit from the program. But arent jails not supposed to be pleasant? Clarke never explains how he can be proud of his jails being both pleasant and unpleasant.
Later in his book, Clarke sanctimoniously chastises the 2012 Democratic Party platform for omitting God. Clarkes public life, characterized by cruelty and condemnation, has nothing to do with the God most intellectually honest Christians engage with. But Clarke wears identity in a way that feels like an accessory, donning his blackness or his Christianity or his conservatism only when its a convenient device for establishing his authority to demean. Clarke is black when it licenses him to judge the lifestyles and choices and motivations of all other blacks, but assumptions people make about black people do not apply to him. He is Christian when it gives him the right to condemn other people for not identifying themselves as such, but not when it governs his actions. He is conservative when it gets him on CNN or the CPAC stage, but not when it could endanger his tenuous grasp on the spotlight.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/i-read-sheriff-clarkes-black-lies-matter-book-so-you-dont-have-to
Roland99
(53,342 posts)neeksgeek
(1,214 posts)In fact, I would argue that it was Zimmerman, a self-appointed "neighborhood watchman," who disobeyed law enforcement when he disregarded the 911 dispatcher's directive to wait for the police.
Would Trayvon Martin have lived, if the cops had gotten there before Zimmerman confronted Martin? Impossible to say.
But it was Zimmerman who caused the events leading to Martin's death. And getting to my point: Zimmerman was not law enforcement.