[What Others Think of You is Their Problem, Unless They Have Power] White Voters’ Perceptions of Crime Continue to Conflict with Reality

Racists Have the Unequal Power to Bring Into Reality the Stereotypes They Project. According to [Pew Research] "Despite double-digit percentage decreases in U.S. violent and property crime rates since 2008, most voters say crime has gotten worse during that span, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The disconnect is nothing new, though: Americans’ perceptions of crime are often at odds with the data.

Leading up to Election Day, a majority (57%) of those who had voted or planned to vote said crime has gotten worse in this country since 2008. Almost eight-in-ten voters who supported President-elect Donald Trump (78%) said this, as did 37% of backers of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Just 5% of pro-Trump voters and a quarter of Clinton supporters said crime has gotten better since 2008, according to the survey of 3,788 adults conducted Oct. 25-Nov. 8.

Official government crime statistics paint a strikingly different picture. Between 2008 and 2015 (the most recent year for which data are available), U.S. violent crime and property crime rates fell 19% and 23%, respectively, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which tallies serious crimes reported to police in more than 18,000 jurisdictions around the nation.

Another Justice Department agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, produces its own annual crime report, based on a survey of more than 90,000 households that counts crimes that aren’t reported to police in addition to those that are. BJS data show that violent crime and property crime rates fell 26% and 22%, respectively, between 2008 and 2015 (again, the most recent year available)."

However, Pew Research cannot explain the reason for the white votary's disconnect with reality? They ask:

"So what explains the gap between perceptions of crime and the data?" And then weakly explain,  "For one thing, official government crime statistics lag behind the times. The FBI and BJS didn’t publish their crime reports for 2015 until fall of this year, meaning they don’t capture recent changes in crime." [MORE]

The white votary's inability to see things as they really are with regard to crime [and so much more] has to do with the power of their belief in their fantasy of white supremacy/racism.  White people relate to non-whites and everything else in the world through comparison. And comparison to others is really just another form of violence. Funktionary defines comparison as follows:

comparison - a disease of the mind due to the ignorance of uniqueness. Each individual is unique and beyond the scope of comparison. Those who fall victim to comparison will either become egoistic or bitter. You don't belong to any hierarchy - nobody is lower or higher than what "you" imagine yourself and "others" to be. Comparison creates differences or distinctions only when there is not uniformity. Comparison limits the possibility of living in the moment. [MORE] Bhagwan Rajineesh explains comparison is "how people start moving in the wrong direction – become oppressors, become exploiters, become dangerous. They are a curse on the earth.' 

Racists gain their identity by comparing themselves to non-white people and feel elevated in this way – beleiving they are superior, better, more intelligent, more moral people than non-white people because of their white skin (lack of skin color or melanin). Some really funny shit and a sad delusion.

Bhagwan explains, 'a person who has to be superior to feel happy is suffering deep down from an inferiority complex. Only an inferior person thinks in terms of superiority. A real person, an authentic person is neither superior nor inferior. He simply IS – unique; nobody is lower than him and nobody is higher than him. The whole existence is equal. The trees and the rocks, and the animals and the birds, and men and women, and God – all are sharing the whole existence on equal terms.' [MORE]

Based on their cartoon beliefs powerful racists go on projecting and have created a play or pretend world for us to live in - a world that has a hiearchy based on their idiocy.

Beliefs are dangerous. Bhagwan states, 'A mind that is filled with belief is a mind which can project anything according to the belief. When you see things, always remember this. . . The whole game is going on in your mind, and a mind filled with belief always goes on projecting things in the world, it sees things which are not there and misses things which are there. This is the problem. The mind which believes is always vulnerable and always provides an opportunity to be exploited by the cheaters - and the cheaters are all around.' [MORE]

The racist mind is deluded. As explained by Dr. Blynd racism is white degeneracy wrongly cast as white supremacy, it is a virus of the mind. 

One such delusion in the racist mind is that Black people are inherently criminal. Amos Wilson explains, "the perpetual domination of African Americans by White Ameri­cans psychically requires the White American criminalization of the African male, i.e., the White American perception of the African male as inherently criminal. In the context of White American domination there is no innocent Black male, just Black male criminals who have not yet been detected, apprehended or convicted. Their mere presence inspires in White Americans, fears of being assaulted, raped, robbed, or some other indefinable dread of being criminally victimized. Fantasies of the sexual molestation of White females by rapacious Black males are common to the White American male and female consciousness, and are frequent themes of their literary, cinematic, and pornographic productions.

For a very large percentage of White Americans, young Black males, sexual promiscuity, and criminality are synonymous. In the dominant White American consciousness the African male is existentially guilty, (i.e., he is guilty by his mere existence) for merely having the audacity of being alive. There is a pervasive feeling among many White Americans that their world would be much more secure if all young Black males were imprisoned, solitarily confined to their ghettos, or kept under constant surveillance. It is no quirky coincidence that such perceptions, feelings and attitudes toward African American males occur most prevalently within the context of White American dominance. Ultimately, criminality of the Black male regardless of its nature, truth or reality, resides in any act or attitude on the part of Black males which appears to White Americans to defy White American authority, control or dominance. It is White America which defines criminality and writes the criminal justice codes. It writes these codes not in the interest of justice as defined by its own moral code, but in the interest of maintaining, justifying and enforcing its continued dominance of the African American community.

In the interest of maintaining and justifying continuity of the White American community, the African male is not only readily suspected of committing crimes, but is actively provoked and seduced into criminality by his White American accusers and persecutors. White America's need to dominate Black America creates the need to perceive the African male as criminal, and to actualize African male criminality by socializing or ritualizing him into it by dent of judicial witchcraft. Such maneuvers are necessary in order to justify the White American community's repression of African Americans and psychodynamically defend the collective White American ego complex." [MORE] and [MORE]

Wilson continues in Black Power, "White America needs an expressly "hyped" Black American criminality the way a neurotic patient needs his symptoms, despite his protests to the contrary. In other words, the existence of Black American criminality, alleged and actual, is a political-economic, social-psychological necessity for maintain­ing White American psychical and material equilibrium. Black American criminality apparently serves fundamental Eurocentric psychopolitical needs and is engendered and sustained for this reason. We will now examine some of these needs.

White American Paranoia

To look at the world or a segment of it with a rigid, hyper-alert, and all-consuming expectation — to search reality repetitively only for confirmation of one's suspicions while ignoring aspects of that reality which disconfirm those suspicions; to pay no attention to opposing rational arguments, cogent, well-founded evidence, except to find in them only those features that seem to confirm one's original views; to examine reality with extraordi­nary prejudice, rejecting facts, information and alternative possibilities while seizing on and exaggerating any scintilla of often irrelevant evidence that supports one's original expectations — denotes a driven need: a psychoneurotic, psychopathological need to defend an ego perilously in danger of disintegration and to defend it regardless of cost to oneself and others. Such a suspicious and paranoid orientation speaks to the need to rigidly construct and control reality so as to maintain self-control, to empower the ego and to gainfully exploit a relevant situation. This rigidity of attention, stereotypical viewing of the world; this chronic condition of hyper-alertness, hypersensitivity; this need to create the world according to one's own deluded images, to subject others to one's paranoid views, to exploitatively have them serve that need, bespeaks the greater need to gain ego satisfaction and enhancement, self-definition and material gain through manipulating the behavior and consciousness over others. Paradoxically, this greater need bespeaks a fundamental dependency on a world and others and simultaneously, of a protest against and denial of that dependency. It expresses an ego vulnerability which must remain defensively hidden, an ego weakness which must appear to itself and others as strength, an extremely tense, unstable ego whose tenuous equilibrium can only be maintained by projecting that tension and vulnerability into the world and others. Thus the keeper of law comes to need the outlaw. And needing him, creates him. The keeper of the disturbs the peace by projecting hallucinated hostile threats where they do not exist.

That the White American must see virtually every Black male as criminal or as a potential criminal regardless of facts to the contrary, bespeaks an intense psychic need of White America to perceive him as such.

What does White America have to gain from choosing to perceive Black males as stereotypically criminal? By socio-psychologically inducing Black males into criminality? Following the trend of thought set forth by Michael Lewis in his book, The Culture of Inequality, alleged Black male criminality is a comfort to White America despite its protestations to the contrary. Alleged Black criminality, while evoking White American fear and loathing, reassures them of their vaunted self-worth, their assumed innately superior moral standing, of their selfcongratulatory self-constraint in contrast with presumed Black American unworthiness, innate inferior moral standing, inherent criminality, lack of self-constraint and self-control. White America's self-appreciation is enhanced as it insatiably feeds on overblown reports about Black criminality while denying its own incomparable criminal record, and its own racist-imperialist incubation and giving birth to the very same criminal forces which now threaten to destroy it.

Black criminals function as a negative reference group vital to maintaining the White American self-image.

Black criminals function as a negative reference group vital to maintaining the White American self-image. The Black criminal is used to support the White American community's self-serving, self-justifying judgments of itself. White America's preoccupation with Black criminality betrays its own need for reassurance; betrays its own basic insecurity regarding its projected moral purity. Consequently, the higher the incidence of reported Black criminality, the more exceptionally righteous White America feels itself to be. The more righteous it feels itself to be the more intensely and guiltlessly it promulgates and justifies its domination and exploitation of African peoples at home and abroad. The alleged innate criminality of Black America, particularly of Black males, and their actual high level of self-destructive criminality remain incontrovertible psycho-political necessities if the White American-Eurocentric culture of inequality is to be self-justifiably continued without end. In the context of this collective necessity, more Blacks are arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to longer prison terms for allegedly committing the same type of crimes as Whites. Many are arrested, charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms merely for committing the crime of being Black in America. 

The White American community's need to stereotypically perceive Blacks as innately criminal, coupled with its socioeco­nomic power to control the availability of resources and their renumerative allocation, confers on it the power of creating or controlling circumstances conducive to the satisfaction of its hegemonic requirements. Under these circumstances, the need of the collective White ego to project an image of endemic Black criminality in order to maintain its power status quo, is tanta­mount to the creation of Black criminality, particularly of the self-destructive kind.

The Black Male as Potential Rebel 

Whether as the result of acculturation or of innate biological propensities, when a community perceives itself to be the object of oppression or perceives its vital institutions and members to be at risk such that decisive actions must be taken, the males traditionally undertake leadership of the resistance. Males and the bonding between them in coalition with their female counter­parts, form the backbone of a viable society. Significant males are essential to a community's intra-dependence, structure, social coherence, continuity, viability, adaptability, self-defense and liberation from oppression and exploitation. Traditionally, the male component of an exploited community is seen by its exploiters, who themselves are usually males, as by temperament and biological/cultural endowment, the most likely to take up arms both psychosocially and/or materially against its oppressors. Consequently, oppressors typically target the male component of the oppressed community for relatively more intense repression, containment, imprisonment, humiliation, emasculation, socio­political-economic discrimination, personality assassination, and various forms of physical eradication. The neutralization of an oppressed community's males by the destruction of their charac­ter, authority and credibility, allows an oppressor to override that society's territorial and institutional imperatives and exposes it to unrestrained, rapacious domination and exploitation. 

Consequently, the institutional and organizational integrity of the oppressed community becomes dysfunctional or nonfunctional and the community is thereupon destructively exploited by aliens and/or is left to self-destruct. Emasculated males under such circumstances may become unwitting allies to, and vehicles of, the genocide and suicide of their community. These eviscerated, uprooted males may inadvertently become instruments of oppression by preying on their own community, thwarting its viable interests instead of defending them. Thus, the psychological disarmament of male resistance results in the destructive exploitation of the community against which that male resistance would ordinarily fight. 

The psychopolitical need of White America to dominate Black America in a variety of ways requires that it neutralizes by any means necessary, any type of Black male empowerment, actual or potential, which may threaten its hegemony. Two of these means involve the criminalization of the Black male and of the Black community in general. The criminalization of the Black male by White America immensely enhances its psychocultural and material advantages. Criminalization of the Black male and the African American community in general by the White American community, psychopolitically benefits the latter community in a myriad of ways including the following:

* Justification of the proscription of the liberties African peoples through continuing oppression, denial of civil and other human rights, and justification of racial discrimination and segregation.

* Justification of the power status quo by utilizing the alleged criminality of the Black community to rationalize severe police repression, social and employment discrimination, restriction of African American political activity and empowerment, civil liberties, constitutional guarantees of individual and communal self-defense, and self-definition.

* Facilitation of White American economic control of the African American community by frustrating and removing potential economic competition from the exploited African American community by denying it access to economic

resources, distorting and thwarting its economic develop­mental potentials. This economic control effectively neutral­izes the ability of the African American community to lead the worldwide African community in challenging worldwide Eurocentric politicoeeonomic hegemony.

•    Provision of rationalizations for a collective White American preemptive strike against feared African economic, cultural, and more importantly, military parity — by aggressively attacking its potentiality on the ground through the self-serving manipulation, constriction, and undermining of the political, educational, economical, cultural institutions as well as experiences important for African American self-development and independence.

•    Creation of interpersonal/intragroup fear, suspicion, mis­trust, violence, and lack of self-respect within the Black community, enabling destabilizing and destructive forces to vitiate its corporate identity, cohesive unity, and its ability to benefit from its own wealth and protect its autonomous liberty. This mission is most efficiently accomplished and sustained if the created fears, etc., appear to flow from factors culturally endemic to the African community and reflective of the supposed inferior personality propensities innately characteristic of African peoples.

• Creation of "social service" and "criminal justice" industries. The "criminal justice" system is best understood as a multi-billion dollar industry wherein the African American male is utilized as its basic raw material, the processing and the "refining" of which provides income for White families, vendors, construction firms, professionals, law and security enforcement agencies. Thus, alleged Black male criminality plays an important vital economic role in many White American communities. For this reason it is highly unlikely that these communities will seriously commit themselves to rectification of those social conditions which instigate and sustain alleged Black criminality and to the negation of those systematic injustices which underpin  a White-controlled penal/economic fiefdom.

•    Justification for the atrocities it historically, currently, and in the future shall continue to perpetuate against the American African community. By ascribing an inherent criminality to African peoples just as it ascribes to these same peoples an alleged inherent intellectual inferiority, the White American community can, through ego-defensive projection and other ego defense mechanisms, deny its role in creating, maintaining, and benefitting from the negative condition of the African American community, and of African people in general.

•    Provision of an underpinning for White communal self-definition, self-image, ego-support, self-aggrandizement and positive self-feeling by elevating itself while denigrating African peoples, vicariously enjoying their relative depriva­tion, alleged depravity, and visible subordination. The absence of perceived African inferiority in all its varieties would bring into question the illusory European superiority complex, destroy European self-confidence and related rationales for the hegemonic domination and exploitation of African peoples in America and abroad.

A perceived high level of Black criminal activity, especially if confined to the African American community, provides both primary and secondary gains for the White American collective ego complex. Therefore, any program which can effectively erase the criminal image of the Black male and reduce his self-destruc­tive criminality will most likely not be forthcoming from the White community despite its pretensions to the contrary. Moreover, any effective crime control programs instituted by the African American community (the place from which any effective program must issue or gain substantial support) will be by deliberate design, stealth, or neglect, targeted for neutralization by an apparently "well-meaning" White community. [MORE] and [MORE]