By Jason Riley
Monday, July 24, 2017
Note: The following
is an excerpt of Jason Riley’s False Black Power?
President Barack Obama traveled to Alabama on March 7,
2015, to deliver a speech marking the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when
600 peaceful protesters seeking the right to vote were beaten and tear-gassed
by mounted police as they tried to march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.
It was one of the more symbolic moments of a deeply symbolic presidency — an
opportunity to remind the country of how much racial progress had been made
over the past half century. But Obama was interested in more than just
commemorating a turning point in the civil-rights struggles of the mid 20th
century. And so a speech rightly honoring “the courage of ordinary Americans
willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod” and “keep marching
towards justice” was laced with Democratic talking points and comparisons
between the problems that blacks faced during legal discrimination and the
problems they faced five decades later. To that end, Obama’s remarks invoked
“unfair sentencing” and “overcrowded prisons” in the criminal-justice system
while making no mention of black-white disparities in crime rates. He also
suggested that voter-identification laws threaten the black franchise and
suppress turnout. Yet in 2012, blacks voted at higher rates than whites,
including in states with the most stringent voter-identification mandates. And
in 2014, voter turnout among all groups was slightly higher in Texas, which has
a strict voter-identification law, than it was in New York, which does not.
Parallels between America under Jim Crow and America
under a twice-elected black president and two black attorneys general may be
tortured, but Obama also knew that such rhetoric plays well politically for the
Left and distracts from liberalism’s poor track record in helping the black
underclass. The goal is to keep black voters angry, paranoid, and content to
put the onus on others to address racial disparities and negative black
outcomes. The identity politics practiced by liberals today treats blacks not
as individuals with agency but rather as a group of victims who are both
blameless and helpless. “Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the
most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in
American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs,”
explained the author Shelby Steele. This liberalism is
invested in an overstatement of America’s
present sinfulness based on the nation’s past sins. It conflates the past into
the present so that the present is indistinguishable from the ugly past. And so
modern liberalism is grounded in a paradox: it tries to be progressive and
forward looking by fixing its gaze backward. It insists that America’s shameful
past is the best explanation of its current social problems.
This liberal conflation of the past and present is
without a doubt politically expedient — note how Democrats regularly dismiss
any Republican criticism of liberal social policies as being motivated by
racial hostility towards blacks — but it’s hard to see how diverting attention
from far more credible explanations of racial gaps today helps blacks advance.
“Despite frequent assertions to the contrary, many of the seemingly intractable
problems encountered by a significant number of black Americans do not result
from racial discrimination,” wrote economist Walter Williams in Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed
on Discrimination? “That is not to say discrimination does not exist. Nor
is it to say discrimination has no adverse effects. For policy purposes,
however, the issue is not whether or not racial discrimination exists but the
extent to which it explains what we see today.” The political Left wins votes
by telling black people that racism, in one form or another, explains racial
disparities that only government programs can address. And groups like the
NAACP raise money and stay relevant by pushing the same narrative — a narrative
that also maintains broad and largely unquestioned support in the mainstream
media.
A few days after Obama’s Selma address, National Public
Radio aired an interview with the city’s mayor, George Evans. The interviewer
wanted to know how “what happened in Selma 50 years ago fits into the current
conversations about race relations in this country.” But Evans, the city’s
second black mayor, didn’t see a clear connection between the problems that
blacks faced five decades ago and current obstacles.
“I’m not sure how it fits,” Evans responded. “We have a
lot more crime going on in 2015 all over the country than we had in 1965.
Segregation existed, but we didn’t have the crime. So now, even though we’ve
gained so much through voting rights and Bloody Sunday, we’ve stepped backwards
when it comes to crime and drugs in the jail system — things like that.”
Apparently, that wasn’t the answer the interviewer was
looking for, and so she pressed the mayor. “What’s life like for the average
black citizen in Selma,” where 80 percent of residents are black, she asked. “I
mean, your city does have challenges. You’ve got chronic unemployment rates.
What are the biggest problems from your vantage point?” Still, the mayor
refused to do what Obama had done in his speech and make facile historical
parallels.
“Well, from the standpoint of jobs, we have a lot of
jobs,” said Evans. “It’s just that there are a lot of people who do not have
the skill level to man these jobs. And that’s the biggest problem we have.
There are industries and businesses here that are searching for people to come
to work. But many times they’re not able to get the jobs because they’re not
going back to pick up that trade or that technical skill that’s needed in order
to take that job.”
The mayor may not have been telling NPR what it wanted to
hear, but his views were perfectly sensible. After having declined
significantly in the 1950s, violent crime began surging in the late 1960s.
Although it has fallen since the early 1990s, the violent-crime rate in 2014
was higher than it was in 1965 and has since returned to 1990s levels in major
cities. Evans’s observation that a high unemployment rate can result from
factors other than a shortage of jobs also jibes with the social-science
research. Moreover, sometimes the problem isn’t a lack of jobs or even job
skills so much as a lack of interest in filling jobs that are available. The
2015 Baltimore riots that followed the death of a black suspect in police
custody were linked by some observers to high unemployment rates in the ghetto.
But a black construction worker at a job site that had been looted told a
reporter that in his experience the neighborhood youths who were “protesting”
seemed to have little interest in finding legitimate employment. “I see about
30 people walking by here every day, and only about two of them will bother to
ask whether we’re hiring,” he said. “You have some brilliant kids,
extraordinary talent, but they don’t see opportunity.”
No comments:
Post a Comment