Faute de Mieux

I'm seeing red. The former Drug Czar and Secretary of Education said

if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.

WTF? As an American, I must respect my fellow citizens' right to free speech, but damn, I am angry and ashamed that such an ignorant bigot ever held a position in the federal government. And doesn't this guy belong to the party that's supposed to be for family values? How sad is it that the former Secretary of Education believes that race makes a person prone to criminal activity? Because it's not like poverty, hopelessness or oppression have anything to do with it. Good lord. Is it any wonder our society is so unequal when we've trusted people like Bill Bennett with positions of national authority over education and drugs?


How can we ever expect to raise people out of poverty, and give at-risk children better lives when the people with the power view skin color as a primary indication of criminality? When people with a national audience can dare to suggest genocide as a cure for social ills? The mere idea that he could even utter such words on national radio shows exactly how ignorant and biased Bennett is.


Bennett has since said that he was not actually suggesting genocide as a means to lower the crime rate. He falsely tried to blame his racist statement on an article in the book "Freakonomics" but one of the the authors has clearly stated that race plays no part in their theory on abortion and crime. (Also, see this article.) He doesn't seem to get that as bad as his supposedly hypothetical idea of forced abortion was, he also revealed his own racist bias that equates blacks with criminal behavior. So far, no apology for that.