Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Racialization run amok
Racists are on the run, and for good reason. Racism doesn’t make sense. Anybody with even an inkling of the Golden Rule guiding them wants to be judged on the content of their character (which they have power to determine), not on the color of their skin (over which they have no control). The natural progression of decent humanity pushes racism down.
True white supremacists are rare and getting more so. Every former measure of legalized racism and its social apparatus (segregation, suffrage, discrimination, Jim Crow legislation, miscegenation laws, etc.) is down. Schools are integrated, many neighborhoods are, too. Interracial dating and marriage are commonplace.
Members of racial minorities either now occupy or have occupied congressional seats, Senate seats, the Supreme Court bench and the Oval Office. In municipalities across the country, a great many mayors, police chiefs, fire chiefs and city council members are people of color.
Among the mass majority of Americans, rank racism is considered a fault, a vice and generally a sign of rather despicable ignorance.
In alarming contrast, however, racialization is on the rise. I define racialists as anti-MLKers: they see, analyze, interpret and judge everything by skin color. This tendency stems directly from a couple of core critical race theory (CRT) tenets: that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality; and that discrimination should be viewed not in terms of individual actions but as the product of systems and institutions.
Such premises explain a lot about radical activists who want to make everything about race — they believe everything is already about race.
That’s why normal, unenlightened (to CRT) people have trouble understanding how Black-on-Black crime is still a product of racism. Or how Black-led police departments and Black officers can still be racist. Logic and common sense are rooted in traditional definitions of racism as individual prejudice, not the collective 21st century CRT version.
That’s also why state legislators like California’s Corey Jackson can propose a bill that police K9 units are racist and keep a straight face. If any outcomes can be shown to be racially disparate, then ipso facto, racism must exist in that situation. There’s no point in digging deeper to know whether outcomes might be determined by other factors, circumstances or decisions.
In some places, it’s true the number of people bitten by police dogs are disproportionately Black. Maybe in those same places the criminal element is also disproportionately Black. But that doesn’t matter to Assemblyman Jackson or other CRT disciples, whose sole mission is to proselytize their racialized dogma.
If you read Jackson’s Assembly Bill 742, you won’t find any mention of critical race theory. Technically, his bill doesn’t promote CRT. This is the same snare often applied to school curricula, in which districts deny they’re “teaching CRT” per se. But if K-12 schools teach that skin color is more than a biological reality, or that racism is institutionalized in American society, they are teaching CRT even if that acronym or the formal name is never used.
The worst trouble with racialization is that once everything is made about race, then race becomes the argument, the focus and the polarizing point. The “everything” gets pushed out of the picture; the issue warranting redress from a higher public profile becomes secondary to race.
Racialization thus gets in the way of real solutions, and in many instances can derail progress toward a productive end because the means come across as militantly doctrinal.
Take Jackson’s K9 bill: The Marshall Project’s investigation of police dog-bite data from agencies in the 20 largest cities, as well as 150 serious cases of injuries, revealed a wide discrepancy on usage and effectiveness of K9 units.
From 2017 to 2019, Chicago had only one incident in which a dog was deployed for an arrest. In the same time period, Los Angeles reported more than 200 bites or dog-related injuries.
Training varies significantly for K9 units, as do deployment protocols. In many cases, police dogs are used against violent criminals and help keep officers out of harm’s way. But in many others, they wind up biting and injuring unarmed people accused of minor incidents.
There is a national nonprofit association for police canine personnel, but no nationwide standardization of reporting on K9 incidents. Statistics and experts indicate that when used properly, police dogs inflict only minor injuries and are invaluable assets in helping police safely avoid lethal force encounters with suspects.
It may very well be time for a larger public discussion about the proper role of police K9 units, best practices for training and deployment, and how to achieve maximum effectiveness and officer safety with minimum risk to nonviolent offenders. Indeed, there might be some strong interracial consensus on the matter.
But that’s not the way the discourse will go now, because racialists gain nothing from a holistic approach that quantifies objective data. The only remedy they want is the subjective one that emphasizes police dogs as racist.
Racializing everything may be good for champions of a fringe theory from the 1970s. But racialization inevitably leads to polarization, and that’s bad for our country.