Comments on: Trent Franks & the Killer Whale

By: Rionn Fears Malechem

Rionn Fears Malechem — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:48:07 +0000

I Googled it, here you go: http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/rep-trent-franks-suggests-blacks-had
If your sole measure of devastation is the abortion rate, well, you’re probably a bad person. I don’t think we have any sort of reliable numbers for abortion rates in slavery, either.

By: Toby Bartels

Toby Bartels — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:38:43 +0000

Hi Keef, thanks for replying. Sorry that my first comment on this site was a critical one.

As I said, I don’t agree with what Franks said, so I can’t exactly defend his statement. But when I found online the video that it was taken from, the cartoon did seem surprisingly unfair. To understand him, I try to imagine that (A) abortion is unequivocally murder, (B) killing people always much worse than forced labour, beatings, rape, and other non-murderous crimes and socio-economic conditions (including all of the non-murderous aspects of slavery), and (C) a white representative of a district with 2.2% black population is in a position to tell black Americans what their problems are (although one can make (C) irrelevant by taking Day Gardner’s endorsement of Franks’s comment instead). Then I can understand why Franks said what he did. And while I disagree with all three of those assumptions and would be happy to see them trashed, the cartoon didn’t address any of that.

Even if you think that the context makes his statement worse, I think that the context makes a huge difference in understanding what he meant. I’d like to see a cartoon that addressed that, perhaps one that ‘tak[es] into account that slaves were forced to breed, often raped, babies born to be sold, etc’. I guess I got a little grumpy that your cartoon suggests (taking recent current events into account) that he ought to be killed by an orca and leaves it at that.

PS to everybody: You can find the comment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=459Dny0aabI between 6:00 and 7:00.

By: keef

keef — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:01:01 +0000

@ Toby–

What he said in context was probably worse.

In “context”, it was about the high rate of abortion in the black community. Not taking into account that slaves were forced to breed, often raped, babies born to be sold, etc.

Ask all your black friends (and a few brown and white folk) if the policies of today are worse on black people than the policies of slavery. I bet even the UCSD students who had the “Compton Cookout” would disagree with Franks on that one.

If Franks wants to make a point about the high rate of abortion in the black community, there are more effective ways to do it.

“Google”..what’s that?

By: Toby Bartels

Toby Bartels — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:15:39 +0000

None of you three actually Googled Trent Franks to find out what he actually said, did you? Not that I agree with him, but you really need to see it in context.

By: Stefan Jones

Stefan Jones — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:30:20 +0000

Bob: That argument — based on cooked-up figures — goes back to before the civil war! It is nonsense, but useful nonsense that gets passed down by generation after generation of bigots.

The best come-back:

“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” — Abraham Lincoln