So I got the name of the town wrong, and looked up the wrong town. Due to my error, I thought the National Review had made a huge error. But it turns out I’m the fool today.<\/p>\n
The original post is recorded below the fold for posterity.<\/p>\n
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According to the National Review, 99% White is “Mostly Minority”<\/strong><\/p>\n I thought the AP story about Bob Dylan getting checked by cops<\/a> in Long Beach, New Jersey, was pretty funny. Mainly because of the two young cops having no idea who “Bob Dylan” is.<\/p>\n But I was surprised to read this take on it, from a reader’s email in the National Review<\/a>:<\/p>\n I just read an AP article this morning about an older white man who was walking around a mostly minority, lower income NJ town. This made him suspicious enough for one resident to call the police. When the 24 year old officer arrived she asked the man’s name. “Bob Dylan,” he said. She didn’t know who he was. She asked what he was doing there. “I’m on tour,” he said. She asked if he had ID. He didn’t. Another officer arrived, this one 20 years old. He didn’t know who Bob Dylan was either. They took him in a squad car to the hotel where he “claimed” he was staying, at which point his people vouched for him. He reportedly “Couldn’t have been any nicer to them.”<\/p>\n Now compare this to to the professor Gates incident: A white man is reported to the police\u2014because of the color of his skin. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n There are a ton of problems with this, not least of which is: Long Beach, New Jersey is 98.5% white<\/a>.<\/p>\n (Also, the median income in Long Beach is $60,000 a year, and 95% of Long Beach’s population is above the poverty line. Someone should let NR know that there’s this neat new invention called “the internet,” which makes fact-checking so easy even Jonah Goldberg could do it.)<\/p>\n To be fair, another NR reader pointed out a difference that wasn’t<\/em> fictional, although the reader dismissed this comparison as “race mongering”:<\/p>\n In short: A comparison that can be falsified with 10 seconds of googling is fair commentary, and is the sort of thing the NR highlights. But a truthful comparison is something only a “race monger” would do. Got it.<\/p>\n Hat tip: Kevin’s twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I got the name of the town wrong, and looked up the wrong town. Due to my error, I thought the National Review had made a huge error. But it turns out I’m the fool today. The original post … Continue reading \n
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