Every day hundreds of millions of Americans get up, go to work and interact with other people all day long. Some of these Americans are black and some are white. There is work to be done, parties to go to, friends to talk to, neighbors to check with, salespeople and store clerks to buy from, and family to keep close to. In most of these cases, it makes no difference whether the other people are black, white, Asian, or Hispanic.
This is a different world from the America of 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous speech on the Washington Mall. His prayer that “… my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” has come closer to reality in 2015 than anyone — except Dr. King himself perhaps — ever dreamed possible. For much if not most of American society the bad old days of institutional racism have vanished forever. Young people of all races do not even understand what the old timers are talking about when they complain about the “Whites Only” signs and the fire hoses of Bull O’Connor.
They see black CEOs of major companies, black millionaires, black movie stars, professors, surgeons, generals and admirals, television personalities, coaches and athletes, elected officials and cabinet officers — even a black president of the United States of America. There are, today, many black role models who have proven that opportunities in America are not limited to white Americans.
So, why all the fuss? Why all the marching, and burning, and violence, and fiery rhetoric?
An overview of the incidents of the past few months shows that something happened to reawaken in certain veteran civil rights advocates all the fears, accusations, and attitudes they lived through in years gone past. Without a shred of evidence, they proceeded to accuse, indict, and convict a young police officer who was apparently fighting for his life with a young man twice his size and, in the process, shot and killed his adversary. Why, of all the similar incidents – at least 313 in 2012 (“Operation Ghetto Storm”, April 4, 2013) – did this one attract so much attention? Why? Apparently because the officer was white and the victim black.
That is what happened to trigger the latest outburst of civil rights activism.
There are several layers of answers to the question of why this incident sparked such a reaction. The most obvious is that this case became widely reported, initially thanks to the victim’s family. But why did this story rally such a protest as it became known? The heart of the matter is the widely held belief in certain black communities that they are deliberately victimized by their local police departments. To substantiate their case, spokesmen point to the high proportion of deaths at the hands of police in which the victims are black males. The black population of America is 13 percent, but the percentage of blacks killed in police actions is nearly one third (32 percent).
This situation combined with the high percent of black males arrested and incarcerated has formed the basis for some extremists to call for a war against the police. It is this call which has led to a 56 percent increase in firearms-related deaths of law enforcement personnel in 2014, with ambush attacks as the leading cause of these deaths. (Preliminary 2014 Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities Report, 12/30/2014)
The most extreme claim is that this killing of blacks is part of a larger conspiracy among whites to keep blacks poor and condemned to underclass status through poor education, substandard housing, and imprisonment of a large proportion of its young males.
Other theories accept the same description of the plight of blacks as “prisoners of the ghettos” in America, but they ascribe it, not to a conscious conspiracy, but to an unconscious “institutional” racism on the part of white society toward black folks.
These are the narratives which inspire such fervent demonstrations, not to mention white angst. From a news point of view, nothing could be sweeter than a replay of the civil rights battles of the 1960s, with the uprising of an oppressed people against their oblivious masters. The media and the demonstrators thus reinforce each other and the protests escalate into world events, defacing America’s image throughout the world. The media and the demonstrators also have their agitators inside the protestors’ ranks, some who hope to rise to the stature of Dr. King, and others who use these manufactured incidents to extort money from frightened corporations.
The absurdity of the “white war on blacks” in 2015 is not only obvious, but it is also dangerous. It allows the people concerned to hide from their own deficiencies and blame a faceless, all powerful enemy for all their many problems.
The current angle of focusing all the pent up hatred on the local police is doubly dangerous, because it threatens the lives and courage of the very people who are the last line of American society’s defense against those who have no respect for either the law or each other.
The worst sin is committed by those who have succeeded in American society, people like Barack Obama and Eric Holder. Instead of reaching out to their troubled brethren and teaching them how to emulate their own success, they publicly buy into the mythical “white racism” and actually abuse the powers of their offices — to which they were elected with the support of white people — by inserting federal power into local jurisdictions through phony “federal investigations”, public statements of support for the demonstrators’ “grievances” against the police, and plots to disarm the police and destroy their credibility.
Al Sharpton and company have decided to introduce whites and blacks alike to today’s black racism. Ordinary black Americans don’t agree with this demonization of white Americans, but they don’t say much. With some very notable exceptions, they let Mr. Sharpton and his cohorts speak for them and accept the risk that there will eventually be a backlash among whites. That will take us all back down the mountain we have climbed so carefully since 1963, back down from the dream of the prophet from Atlanta.
Blacks and whites are called to come together and repudiate the black racists and so continue our American journey to the Promised Land.
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