By Wilfred Reilly
Sunday, October 17, 2021
This past summer, I spent half an hour scrolling through
independent journalist Andy Ngo’s series of “Antifa mug-shots” on Twitter.
These were images of violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter gatherings that had
been organized to call attention to the first anniversary of George Floyd’s
death at the hands of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. As I
looked at the photos, the thought that kept crossing my mind was that the
people arrested for Antifa and even BLM violence seemed to be overwhelmingly
Caucasian. By my rough count, well over 90 percent of Ngo’s images depicted a
racially un-ambiguous white person engaged in one form of brutality or another
in the name of racial justice.
It’s fair to say that this was to some degree a regional
phenomenon. In the Atlanta riots after the killing of Rayshard Brooks, for
example, most of the participants were not white. However, Ngo’s hundreds of
pictures of virtually all-white “Black Lives Matter” activists, taken in
Portland and other cities, accurately capture a significant trend in
contemporary U.S. society. Across a range of issues—politically correct
language, police defunding, affirmative action, gun rights—the people pushing
for major “pro-POC” social and legal change are not themselves people of color.
Instead, many are white radicals, attempting to use the genuine plight of poor
minorities as a wedge to force through changes to American society—changes that
most people of color do not ourselves want. Both anecdotal evidence and hard
data bear this out.
The woke left’s recent advocacy for politically correct,
intensively monitored speech provides perhaps the best contemporary example of
this. To put it mildly, it’s not difficult to notice that a significant number
of Americans currently seem to be very offended by everyday things their
countrymen say. A complete list of those “canceled” for offensive speech during
2020–21 would run many pages long, but a representative sample includes:
·
the long-term play-by-play man for the
Sacramento Kings basketball team, who was fired for tweeting “All Lives Matter”
at a black player with whom he regularly enjoyed friendly political banter;
·
popular UCLA professor Gordon Klein, who had to
be placed under armed guard at home after stating aloud that he did not think
“trauma” related to the death of George Floyd was a sufficient justification
for skipping law-school exams;
·
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling,
who had her name taken off a British school after her controversial comment
that biological sex is real.
Among the more remarkable cases, one of the U.S.’s
leading soccer stars (for whatever that’s worth) was let go from his job as a
professional athlete following controversial social-media posts by his wife.
The Los Angeles Galaxy opted to part ways with winger Aleksandar Katai after
his spouse Tea said online (in Serbian) that violent protesters were
“disgusting cattle” who should be “shot.” Katai himself never said it.
Many Americans seem to want this level of censorship
enhanced. In fact, this sentiment was surprisingly popular even before George
Floyd’s death. Pew Research Center data from as far back as 2015 showed that at
least 40 percent of young Millennial Americans favored limiting speech that is
“offensive to minorities.”
If you go by the interpretations of popular media,
attitudes such as these are driven by hypersensitive minorities. As Yascha
Mounk noted in the Atlantic, most Americans see Internet debate as
taking place largely between two camps: “Team Resentment,” made up of older
white conservatives and “Team Woke,” which is “young, likely to be female, and
predominantly Black, brown, or Asian.” Intuitively, this makes a certain kind
of sense: A casual observer might well assume that the majority of those
attempting to, say, change the traditional term Latino/a to
the more gender-neutral Latinx would themselves be Latino/a/x.
However, as Mounk notes, “reality is nothing like this.”
According to the best publicly available data, members of most minority groups
dislike PC culture more than whites do. Eighty-eight percent of Native American
Indians, 87 percent of all Hispanics, 82 percent of Asian Americans, and 75
percent of blacks (vs. 79 percent of whites) call political correctness “a
problem” for the United States. Per several studies, the only group that
strongly supports the movement of speech in a more woke direction is made up of
young liberal white women. A Pew poll from the summer of 2020, specifically
about the use of “Latinx,” strongly corroborates this point. Only a quarter of
all Latinos and roughly 38 percent of Latino college graduates have even heard
of the term. What’s more, only 3 percent ever opt to use it, and many seem to
find it ridiculous. If anything, the pattern here is one of white leftists
telling Hispanic taxpayers to speak in a more woke fashion—and Latinos refusing
to comply.
The debate over policing speech is not an outlier here.
Many other contemporary policy debates break down essentially to left-leaning
elite whites demanding social change on behalf of minority Americans, with
actual black and brown citizens opposing the proposed changes roughly as much
as the larger American population does. Defunding the police, for example, was
a left-wing cause célèbre for much of 2020. In June of that year, the New
York Times ran an astonishing op-ed headlined “Yes, We Mean Literally
Abolish the Police.” Around the same time, Mother Jones argued
in a widely read piece that the police should be defunded even if it did not
“poll well.” Additionally, many left-leaning cities (such as Portland,
Minneapolis, New York City, and Los Angeles) actually moved to slash police
budgets.
However, numbers from the journalist Matthew Yglesias,
cited in the Mother Jones piece, indicate that police
defunding was opposed 49–29 percent by blacks and 60–26 by whites, thus
inspiring the defensive thrust of the article’s argument. A more decisive study
conducted by Gallup and reported on extensively by Newsweek in
August 2020 found that 81 percent of black Americans want the police presence
in their neighborhoods “to either remain the same or increase.” Only 19 percent
of blacks favored any decrease whatsoever in police presence. Newsweek author
Jocelyn Grzeszczak stated flatly: “Black Americans’ responses to the question
were nearly on par with the national average, in which 67 percent of all U.S.
adults said they wanted police presence to remain the same and 19 percent said
they wanted it to increase.”
There’s no shortage of serious empirical analysis
demonstrating similar findings.1 Entertainingly, for example,
black Americans test as perhaps the most conservative and traditional U.S.
citizens when it comes to issues of homosexuality and transgenderism. While
slogans such as “Black Trans Lives Matter” have become a staple of left-leaning
demonstrations, the most recent Pew data indicate that 55 percent of black
Democrats and 41 percent of Hispanic Democrats “say that a person’s gender is
determined by their sex at birth,” while fewer than 25 percent of white
Democrats agree. Similarly, 68 percent of white Democrats said that society has
not gone far enough toward acceptance of transgender people, while only 46
percent of black Democrats and 50 percent of Hispanic Democrats agree. And it’s
important to note that figures for black and Latino conservatives,
who are likely to be even more skeptical of gender flexibility than their
left-leaning counterparts, were not provided in the article just cited. It’s
worth recalling that a majority of black voters in California voted against
same-sex marriage, famously pushing the state’s Proposition 8 over the finish
line a decade or so back, and serious academic research continues to link the
traditionalism of black attitudes to factors such as high levels of church
attendance.
Then there’s education policy. On charter schools,
labeled racist by most liberals and leftists, data show a significant split.
Blacks and Hispanics, especially parents, overwhelmingly favor school choice.
According to recent data from Democrats for Education Reform, 58 percent of
black Democrats express favorable views of charter schools, while just 31
percent express unfavorable ones; the equivalent figures for Hispanics were 52
percent and 30 percent. In contrast, just 26 percent of white Democrats favor
charters, while 62 percent do not. Education writer John Valant notes that
support for charters is “strong and stable” among blacks and Hispanics, but
“weak and…plummeting” among left-leaning whites—and goes so far as to say that
white opposition to charters could have “tangible, unwelcome consequences for
families of color.”
The point should by now be clear. American radicals have
recognized—at least since the late 19th century—that racial conflict is a
potential seedbed for some form of proletarian revolution. When advancing plans
relating to hotly contested issues, such as police reform, political
correctness and speech codes, or even the fight against climate change, it is
often irresistibly tempting for advocates to market these as routes not only to
left-bloc political success but also to “racial justice.”
The simple reality is that actual black (and Hispanic)
citizens do not show much enthusiasm for constantly policing our language,
pulling good (and mostly minority) cops out of our own neighborhoods, letting
biological males play hoops in the WNBA, or depriving their kids of a sound
education in service to notions of equity.
* * *
Owing in part to my being a black man, I find that an
obvious explanation for the minority rejection of these ideas springs to mind.
While it’s often ignored during discussions among (mostly white)
activists, the large majority of those harmed by well-intentioned but misguided
radical policies will themselves be “people of color.” This may be especially
true in the case of proposals for defunding America’s police forces. As
empirically minded scholars on the center-right have long pointed out, “soft on
crime” anti-police policies tend to dramatically increase crime rates in urban
minority neighborhoods.
This is an objectively measurable fact. Between 1963 and
1993, murders in the United States increased from 8,640 to 24,530 (a 284
percent rise) following the “fruit of the poison tree” doctrine mandating the
inadmissibility in court of any evidence compromised by technical police
misconduct, and following the widespread adoption of “community policing” and
more lenient sentencing policies. Homicide was not an unusual outlier offense
in this respect: Forcible rapes surged from 17,650 to 106,010 (an increase of
601 percent), and robberies from 116,470 to 689,870 (an increase of 592
percent). These trends, concentrated in poor urban and minority areas, did not
begin to reverse until the adoption of no-nonsense “broken windows” policing by
New York City and other big American cities in the mid-1990s.
We have, unfortunately and unnecessarily, seen the same
trends return more recently. Multiple major outlets reported a “Ferguson
Effect” increase in crime following the deaths of Trayvon Martin and then
Michael Brown during the past decade, and DNAInfo analysts looking specifically
at my hometown of Chicago established that police stops had dropped by almost
exactly 90 percent during a period when gun-violence crimes “skyrocket(ed).”
Last year saw another dramatic rise in crime from that baseline, as murders
increased past the 20,000 mark for the first time in 25 years. Put differently,
there were some 4,000 more murders in 2020 than there were in 2019—with the
latter year by no means having been a famously peaceful one.
As I have noted in the electronic pages of Quillette, COVID-19
may have had something to do with this, but serious bodies such as the
Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice trace the beginning of last year’s
surge in homicides (and “aggravated assaults and gun assaults”) specifically to
“late May and June of 2020”—the period of police pullback and street rioting
that immediately followed the death of George Floyd. In a USA Today op-ed
from April 2021, Jason Johnson attributed the surge in violent offenses almost
totally to the “retreat” of police forces across America, and he and others
have pointed out that most of those killed during the resulting totentanz were
urban minority men. Truly defunding the cops would be terrible for everyone,
worse still for the nation’s city dwellers, and worst of all for blacks.
That sentence sums up the likely effect of many woke
policies. For example, New York City and other metropolises are currently
considering abandoning all elementary and middle-school gifted programs. The
usual argument for this—invariably made without consideration of the fact that
different ethnic groups currently have different mean scores on standardized
aptitude tests—is that these programs must somehow be racist given that white,
black, Hispanic, and Asian students are not always proportionately represented
within them. Thus, the claim goes, they must be discarded to help people of
color. Some educational systems have gone a step further and announced the
abolition of all forms of high-stakes testing. This latter trend is not simply
or even primarily a secondary-school phenomenon. The University of California
system recently announced that it will abandon SAT and ACT scores as a
requirement for admission across its entire suite of institutions. The primary
goal here, at least per many supporters? More “ethnic and income diversity” on
the UC campuses.
However, there are obvious problems with the idea of
removing the most challenging college-prep courses from the schools in our
nation’s big cities and then no longer requiring the graduates of those schools
to study up for the SAT when applying to top (blue) state colleges. Most
notably, the students, many of them members of racial minority groups, simply
might not learn anything. And, in fact, evidence is mounting that exactly this
seems to be happening. Over the past three years, respectively, precisely
eight, 10, and seven black students got into Stuyvesant—New York’s top
open-admissions public high school—after applying from various neighborhood
institutions. As heterodox commentators such as John McWhorter point out, these
figures are down dramatically from those achieved during years in the quite
recent past, when a better infrastructure of gifted-and-talented and test-prep
programs still existed in minority NYC schools. Most Stuyvesant seats that
might once have gone to black or Jewish future scholars are today held not by
Anglo-Saxon teenage gentry but by Asian immigrant kids. Fewer than 160 whites
made the Stuyvesant cut this year, and 493 out of roughly 750 current students
are Asian American. One more than suspects that the parents of those students
have rejected progressive “help,” clinging hard to the gifted-and-talented
programs in their local schools and calling in tutors if the resources aren’t
readily available.
The hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic enrollees
in the country’s charter schools take the same approach. Thomas Sowell recently
pointed out that in the major American charter networks, among those classrooms
in which students of color make up 90 percent or more, kids perform almost
exactly on par with the majority-white student population of the nation’s
public schools. Some do far better. The average combined SAT score for the
sizable and mostly black senior class at the Success Academy charter-school
system in 2019 was 1268; 10 percent of the class scored higher than 1400. Like
most charters today, Success Academy is a “pure lottery” school that does not
get to pick and choose students. Given that fact and the school’s results—in
New York City!—it is no surprise that minority parents, unlike white Democrats,
are strong supporters of charter education.
It’s also not surprising that black Americans, concerned
with rising murder rates in their neighborhoods and education policies that
hurt their kids, are generally less consumed than white woke folk with matters
such as hate speech. At the same time, the left’s focus on issues like harmful
speech serves as a distraction from the woke initiatives that continue to fail
minority Americans.
The obvious question that usually arises when someone
makes these points is: “So why do 90 percent or so of black Americans vote for
the Democratic Party?” While I am not a hard partisan for either electoral
team, the answer is as simple as the query: We are constantly told that the
only serious alternative to the left is headed up by genocidal racists. Even
milquetoast Mitt Romney was lambasted for his desire to put “y’all back in
chains” by future president Joe Biden while Donald Trump was frequently described
by quite mainstream outlets as a literal white supremacist. This pitch has been
wildly successful with minority voters. If it ever stops working—as I am hardly
the first to note—a new era of U.S. politics could dawn almost instantly.
While we wait and see if this will ever happen, one
practical piece of advice remains relevant: If you want to know what individual
members of any particular group happen to think, ask them—not those
who claim to speak and act in their best interest.
1 Though not related to wokeness, the
pattern is similar on the issue of gun sales. In September 2020, gun sales to
black Americans were up some 58 percent over the previous year, despite the
left’s concerted push for significant gun-control measures.
No comments:
Post a Comment