ISBL Asshat of the Week: Jim Honeyford

But first ... an UPDATE:
An emergency has come up ... nothing horrible, just an inconvenience ... so the trip to Miami ... and the sun ... is off for this month and will hopefully be rescheduled soon.

So, yeah, I'll be here, and now my blog has all kinds of posts scheduled for the week any way!

Now, on to the Asshat ... it really was an easy pick this week …

Republican Washington State Senator Jim Honeyford was debating legislation last week that would require lawmakers to include in future bills a statement of the racial impact their proposed legislation would have.

Now quite a few state legislatures require bills to include financial impact statements — you know, how much is John  Q Public gonna have to pay for this — and some states do the same for the environment — how is this legislation going to hurt, or help, the environment; but Honeyford’s proposal is how a bill will impact race—as in, how would a bill disproportionally impact racial minorities, for example. It sounds kinda reasonable, but Honeyford didn’t seem quite clear on his message:

"It's generally accepted that the poor are more likely to commit crimes. And generally, I think, accepted that people of color are more likely poor than not. So how does that factor into your equation?"

One Senator, a democrat, Bob Hasegawa, asked for a clarification:

"It's probably true that there's more people of color in jails or facing prosecutions. But will these types of analysis will help us get to the root of what is actually causing that kind of disparate treatment."

Honeyford replied:

"I want to correct what I said. I said the poor are more likely to commit crimes, and, uh, colored [are] most likely to be poor. I didn't say anything else other that. And I believe that's an accepted fact, and if you check any of your sociology books or anything else you'll find that's an accepted fact of our society."

Let’s not even get into the idea that he said poor people are criminals — without bothering to understand why people are poor in the first place — or that most poor people are people of color, let’s just understand that in the year 2015, a politician, an elected official, during the course of debate, thought the best word to describe African Americans was ‘colored.’

Jim Honeyford. ISBL Asshat of the Week.
via NCRM