WHITE PEOPLE TO BLAME
COMMENTARY
After the tragedy in Dallas, Hillary Clinton issued a call to combat “systemic racism” and admonished “white people” to do “a better job of listening” to African American grievances.
It was a peculiar reaction to the murder of five white police officers by a black racist.
After all, the evidence suggests that white people have been listening a great deal to black grievances for some time now, and that their behavior has changed quite a bit as a result. It was, after all, a nearly all-white Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And it has been white legislators that created a modern welfare state which disproportionately redistributes money from well-to-do whites to less well-to-do blacks.
It was Richard Nixon who issued a sweeping executive order expanding affirmative action hiring for federal employees and white corporate leaders that subsequently expanded racial preferences in private-sector hiring. White college administrators have established an extensive system of such preferences in college admissions and it has been white Supreme Court justices that have upheld their constitutionality.
On a personal level, it’s been years since I’ve heard a white person tell a racist joke and the only people who seem to use the “N-word” these days are black comics. The uttering of racial slurs, or even vague expressions of “racial insensitivity,” can cause social ostracism and abruptly destroy careers.
Interracial marriage has increased significantly over time, and if there are is any survey research indicating more than minuscule white opposition to full rights for African Americans I am unaware of it.
Finally, of course, there was the fact of the election and re-election of Barack Obama with substantial white support, along with the hunch that a majority of white Americans would have also eagerly voted for Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice had they chosen to seek the presidency.
Taking all this, and much else, into consideration, it isn’t clear what white folks can do that they aren’t already doing, or what they are doing that would help if they stopped.
Perhaps we should further expand the welfare state, national debt be damned. And maybe grant reparations for slavery, with those who were never slaves receiving payments from those who were never slave owners. Or order the police to arrest fewer blacks and more whites, regardless of the evidence, in order to reduce those “racial disparities” in our criminal justice system that Obama always cites.
We might even consider encouraging more white kids to drop out of school to close that large black-white gap in educational achievement.
And if we are unwilling to go to those extremes (and we should be), perhaps we can just put Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book on the coffee table to demonstrate our racial sensitivity or refuse to watch the Oscars because there aren’t enough black nominees.
The suspicion thus grows in all this that liberals like Obama and Hillary can’t give credit where credit is due because the two most sacred totems of their worldview is that white people are racist and black people are helpless victims of white racism.
It has become something of an impregnable ideological fortress — as long as some cracker out in the sticks waves about a confederate flag, liberals will be able to keep the cherished narrative alive and preserve their heroic role therein.
Once we venture into the realm of abstractions, with charges of “systemic” or “structural” this or that, facts and logic become casualties.
But one also senses that logic and evidence have always been largely beside the point; the white racism claim constitutes a ruse designed to make liberals feel morally superior to the rest of us and avoid any serious look at the problems afflicting the black community, let alone actually propose doing something about them.
White racism doesn’t make young black males kill other black males at such a rate that living in our inner cities becomes more dangerous than duty in Afghanistan. And police brutality doesn’t cause black teenage girls to have babies out of wedlock that they can’t take care of (with all the social pathologies that follow, from educational failure to poverty and crime).
Americans are increasingly skeptical of elite commentary about race because they sense that most of what they hear is hypocritical, irrelevant and purely for show; nothing more than posturing designed for political advantage.
Hillary says that white folks need to change, but what kind of change has she, or any other Democrat, asked from blacks? And when was the last time our nation’s first black president talked honestly about the problems plaguing the black community, including that illegitimacy rate that now exceeds 70 percent?
Guess it’s just easier to call white people racist, and crank up the black turnout in November.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.