Race conversations shouldn’t tear us apart
If 2021 was anything other than a plague year, it was a year of racial reckoning. The call for recognizing the need for diversity, equity and inclusion was everywhere from big business to local government to grade schools and universities.
And there has been a backlash. Concerns that critical race theory was being taught in public schools led to the election of Glenn Youngkin as governor in Virginia and a near Democratic disaster in New Jersey.
Amid a rise in killings in big cities across the country, Philadelphia has seen a particularly nasty debate between a white prosecutor trying to change what he sees as a racist justice system and a Black former mayor with a tough-oncrime reputation who blames the rise in murders on Black Lives Matter-inspired reforms.
In Chicago, Jussie Smollett’s multiplefelony conviction for faking a heinous Maga-inspired hate crime enflamed matters further. The official Black Lives Matter organization continued its slide into extremism with attacks on capitalism and the claim that the prosecution of the former “Empire” actor was a “white supremacist charade.”
The new year promises more of the same as Democrats run from the once proudly proclaimed slogan “defund the police” and their uber-woke, but unpopular, name for Hispanics, “Latinx.”
Meanwhile, Republicans look to crime and CRT to replicate Youngkin’s victory in other states that voted Joe Biden for president in 2020.
The new year promises to be one of division as a nationwide slate of elections take center stage, but it doesn’t have to be. Democrats and their allies who think our moment of racial reckoning is overdue have the opportunity to look for common ground.
The suite of reforms inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement – from qualified immunity reform and new standards for police violence to increased civilian accountability and more transparency – don’t have to come from a soft on
crime perspective.
Every time a person is wrongly convicted for a crime, the real criminal goes free. We can have compassion for the wrongly convicted and fight to set them free, and at the same time support aggressive policing to put criminals in jail.
We can treat drug abuse as a public health problem, diverting those arrested to treatment instead of jail, while being tough on dealers and more violent criminals. We can end cash bail for minor nonviolent offenses, at the same time we don’t allow accused murderers back on the street before trial.
Democrats just have to make this point every time they talk about policing: Poor and minority communities suffer the most from abusive police, but they suffer the most from predatory crime as well.
Take the crime lab in Washington, D.C., which might have sent untold numbers of innocents to prison for crimes they didn’t commit with incompetent testimony
and tainted evidence. It wasn’t a Jim Crow-era relic tainted by racism; it was founded in 2012 under a Black Democratic mayor. A big city needs good forensic science to keep its citizens safe at the same time it needs an independent check on police to keep the evidence accurate.
The fact that 21st century schools need to teach the full awful truth about race in America from its roots in the centuries before the Declaration of Independence to the era of Jim Crow and the disparities of today doesn’t need to be divisive. It needs nuance.
We can teach the perfidy of the Founding Fathers who owned slaves at the same time we teach of the Founders’ heroic struggles to restrict and abolish America’s original sin. Some were the same men.
You can teach about the founding and continuing flaws of America without ignoring the incredible legacy that the Founders passed on to all Americans, Black and white alike, through things like
the First and Second Amendments that continue to protect us all.
You can teach the taint of white supremacy in American history at the same time you teach the role of whites in overcoming it. The Supreme Court that overturned segregation in schools was as white as the Continental Congress. So was the Senate that passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Teaching the facts of our history can be decoupled from the cancel culture, anti-capitalist approach popularized in The New York Times fact-challenged 1619 project now being promoted for use in schools. Democrats just have to speak up about what exactly they want.
I want us to live in a more united country even as we address divisive issues. We can do it if we are willing to seek common ground and speak with nuance.
David Mastio is an opinion writer for USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter @Davidmastio.