Feminism To Blame For Daunte Wright's Death, Everything Else

Oh look, Steven Crowder's still talking.

Just a few weeks after being kicked out of YouTube's Partnership Program for a bizarrely racist rant about Black farmers, conservative "comedian" Steven Crowder now has something to say about the killing of Daunte Wright.

 It's not good .

Conservatives have a vested interest in pretending that systemic racism against Black people doesn't exist, particularly in police departments, as well as pretending that there is absolutely no kind of problem with cops killing or otherwise brutalizing unarmed Black people. Because if there is a problem with cops killing unarmed Black people, everything else falls apart. So Steven Crowder has figured out a way for conservatives to be able to admit that maybe Daunte Wright did not deserve to be killed for an out-of-place air freshener.

After seeing the video of the shooting, Crowder determined that the problem wasn't racism, or an extreme overreaction by police officers to an air freshener, but feminism . Because Kimberly Ann Potter is a woman and women shouldn't be police officers, but feminism lied to them and said they could be. Even though it is a job for the menfolk.

This brilliant theory, however, requires that one ignore the many, many examples, even just this year, of male police officers killing unarmed Black people.

 Transcript via Media Matters:  

The issue here is the accidental shooting and the woman who didn't know the difference between a Taser and a firearm. And not only that, her partner crosses that line of sight on the barrel like three times. This woman was a danger to herself and her partners. And I will tell you this: This is the issue that I have with female officers. Oh, can you say it? What is a female cop going to do if not shoot? Whether it's a Taser or a gun. That guy clearly said, "Oh, this is my chance," the second — the second he was passed from the big, burly male officer to the female officer. "Taser, Taser, Taser, Taser." And she couldn't even tell that she had a loaded firearm aimed at her own partner.

This is something that I think is pretty important. It relates to everything. I was talking about this with you yesterday. It relates to feminism and how they've lied to women. We've seen this, obviously, with the female officers, women in the military where they create gender-neutral fitness tests and then more women fail so they say, "Well, we'll have a gender-neutral test, which we already lowered the bar to make sure more women passed, but now we're going to take into account biological differences." What? And then, by the way, if you claim to be a woman and you're a man, you can take the gender-neutral but biologically different test. "Yeah, we want you to go to the front lines and you don't have to do a tummy tuck, just do planks." Good, September 11, that will keep the terrorists shuddering in their boots, if they have boots over there. Shuddering in their sandals.

A tummy tuck is a surgical procedure meant to remove excess fat and skin from the abdominal area. He's thinking of leg tucks. The leg tuck was in fact the number one most failed requirement for both men and women in the Army's physical fitness test, and because the Army would like more soldiers please, and would also like to be able to keep older active soldiers on duty, they have given everyone the option of doing a plank for two minutes, which also demonstrates core strength.

But hey, Steven Crowder's got sexism to do here. And transphobia. And racism.

Here's the thing, we convince young women that they add value in ways that they don't because we convince young women that they add value in ways that a man would add value. So, let's use this with a female officer there, OK? And I know this isn't a rookie. She's been on the force for over two decades from what I understand. [...]

But this woman probably goes out — you see this a lot with women in the military, women in the police force saying, "Look, I aced my exam." Well, great. You now have reached the bottom rung of men in physical capability. You can't physically subdue somebody, so you have to shoot them, so you have to tase them. Men want a partner in the police force that can watch their back. They don't care that you did well for a woman, they want the most capable person there humanly possible. You add no value if you did the female push-ups. You add no value if you scored off the charts on a written exam if you panic in the field.

And what about all the men who "panic in the field"? Because there sure seem to be a lot of them. Very regularly, these big burly male police officers say they just panicked . Is male panicking different from female panicking somehow? Because it seems like it is not.

Contrary to what Crowder would like to get at here, there is not actually a widespread issue with female officers "panicking" and shooting people or mistaking guns for tasers. Rather, female officers are far less likely to discharge their weapon while on duty. A 2017 Pew survey found that while 30 percent of male officers have used their gun while on duty, only 11 percent of female officers have done the same. Male officers are also more likely to believe that aggression is more effective than courtesy "in certain parts of the city," and are more likely to "agree that some people can only be brought to reason the hard, physical way."

Men were also more likely to say that the job had made them callous.

There is, however, a widespread issue with police officers in general, regardless of gender, overreacting to perceived threats when a Black person is involved and then killing them as a result of that overreaction. Why? For one, due to the deeply ingrained belief that Black people, Black men in particular, are more of a threat to them than are white people. Which is racist . For another, because they find it easy to detach themselves from the humanity of the Black people they are dealing with, and that makes it a lot easier to ignore them when they are crying for their mothers and saying they can't breathe. Which is also racist .

Now, we could say that Steven Crowder's ability to look at case after case of mostly male police officers killing unarmed Black people, see one female cop, and shout that it's because of feminism, has something to do with him being a man. Perhaps on some level it does — but that doesn't mean he couldn't be just as bad at looking at evidence and drawing the wrong conclusions if he were a woman. After all, Laura Ingraham exists. 

[ Media Matters ]

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