This was written in 2014. I sincerely doubt whether it could be published today without an outbreak of total mass hysteria.
Which is why I’m posting the link, as well as a representative sample:
The Constitution allows a defendant to make three crucial decisions in his case. He decides whether to plea guilty or not guilty. He decides whether to have a bench trial or a jury trial. He decides whether he will testify or whether he will remain silent. A client who insists on testifying is almost always making a terrible mistake, but I cannot stop him.
Most blacks are unable to speak English well. They cannot conjugate verbs. They have a poor grasp of verb tenses. They have a limited vocabulary. They cannot speak without swearing. They often become hostile on the stand. Many, when they testify, show a complete lack of empathy and are unable to conceal a morality based on the satisfaction of immediate, base needs. This is a disaster, especially in a jury trial. Most jurors are white, and are appalled by the demeanor of uneducated, criminal blacks.
And then there’s this:
This inability to see things from someone else’s perspective helps explain why there are so many black criminals. They do not understand the pain they are inflicting on others. One of my robbery clients is a good example. He and two co-defendants walked into a small store run by two young women. All three men were wearing masks. They drew handguns and ordered the women into a back room. One man beat a girl with his gun. The second man stood over the second girl while the third man emptied the cash register. All of this was on video.
My client was the one who beat the girl. When he asked me, “What are our chances at trial?” I said, “Not so good.” He immediately got angry, raised his voice, and accused me of working with the prosecution. I asked him how he thought a jury would react to the video. “They don’t care,” he said. I told him the jury would probably feel deeply sympathetic towards these two women and would be angry at him because of how he treated them. I asked him whether he felt bad for the women he had beaten and terrorized. He told me what I suspected—what too many blacks say about the suffering of others: “What do I care? She ain’t me. She ain’t kin. Don’t even know her.”
As so many have said before of this attitude: “You can take the African out of Africa, but…” I prefer to think of it as “Africa Wins Again; Just Not In Africa.”
Read the whole thing. The observations made by the writer are based on years and years of experience, and are not his opinion.
Afterthought: Just so we’re clear about the whole thing: this attitude isn’t confined to Blacks (see here); it just seems to be more prevalent.
In the last part of the essay is this:
I have no argument with the “cannot care for themselves” part, but the rest? I call that suicidal altruism. It’s a display of phony virtue, a bill meant to be paid by someone else, and we can’t afford it. It’s leading us to the death of the middle class.
I agree 100%.
If he wants to spend his own money supporting people who can’t or won’t support themselves, good for him. Unfortunately, most people who espouse this view tend to want to spend *my* money supporting these people.
Leftists: always generous with other peoples’ money.
It’s far worse than “phony virtue”. It’s pathological altruism.
“What do I care? She ain’t me. She ain’t kin. Don’t even know her.”
This is not Africa speaking, this is the fundamental, universal human voice prior to life in communities – what you would hear from someone raised in a robotic creche, or a State institution. .
My daughter had a black classmate in her private school who was living with her grandparents, plural. The mother was a crack addict. The older sister got pregnant at age 15. The friend couldn’t keep up and had to transfer to a special school also private on the grandparent’s dime. On the other hand the African-American Mids we’ve served as sponsor parents for at the nearby USNA have been exceptional men and women.
Early-on I was taught that “10% screw things up for everyone else”. Youthful skepticism of that truth has since been overridden by the sore ass of experience. It’s the only universal statement I’ve found valid. Perhaps some corollary is found if the ten-percent example is viewed in inverse minority-majority context to the public defenders experience. Simply put, “the conduct & proficiency of a minority of blacks cause all blacks to be viewed in a like manner. The author and I share the same conclusion; “I do not know the solution to this problem.” I also know that rational all-hands discussion is near-on unobtainable.
Timely topic as it happens; Richard Overton, our oldest WWII veteran died yesterday at age 112. He was black. His death brings to mind a family friend who at age 93-94 is a USN veteran of WWII. Friend is also black. He’s been an all-round standup sailor, citizen, churchman, husband, father and friend. Now his strings running out as it will for all of us.
Most people don’t want to admit all this. Most “blacks” are housed in urban public ghettos. To leave, they have to go through a few hurdles to demonstrate that they can in fact function in western civilization, stay out of prison, and behave themselves. These are the ones who get to enjoy “affirmative action”. The rest are written off to live in the urban zoos.
One thing to keep in mind is that he’s a public defender. ANYONE who can possibly find an alternative will pay for a lawyer who doesn’t have 90 other clients and is looking for an expedient solution (this isn’t to say that PDs aren’t interested in acquitting their clients, just that they are too overworked to do so). You’ll find similar stories out of white Appalachia and other places where meth/crack/heroin is destroying entire communities. The common thread is multi-generational poverty, where the older generations can’t or won’t provide the moral upbringing necessary to prevent children from growing up feral.
As you get into the middle classes, where education and a history of hard work shape moral outcome, racial and ethnic differences fade. Our PD rarely represents them, because, again, anyone who has any sense hires a lawyer who has the time and resources to defend them.
Yeah, but …
There’s not a govt / media / liberal monolith promoting white Appalachians as a favored minority deserving of special favors and privileges. We’re not constantly told that white Appalachians are like that due to institutional racism, or that we constantly display”micro-aggressions” against them. And normal white kids don’t go around mimicking white Appalachian culture or dress because that’s what they constantly see in movies, tv, ads, etc.
And the percentages tell a story that no one wants to discuss.
Maybe he should stop wasting his time and let his clients go through with a jury trial and let them take the stand.
All he’s really required to do is make sure their Constitutional rights aren’t violated.
Then, when they’re sentenced to long prison terms he can tell them, “You know why you got this sentence? Because you’re a dumbass!”