Topic: Decline of the West
Back in August there was talk that the shooting of a young black man by a white police officer in the city of Ferguson, Missouri would be a defining moment in the annals of civil rights. There was much bloviating about institutional racism, militarized police, the devaluation of African-American lives, etc. etc. Obviously—inevitably!—this crying injustice would rouse the conscience of the nation.
Well, here we are on the first day of December and what is obvious is that the Ferguson affair and its untidy aftermath have done nothing but deepen the divide between white and black Americans. And in retrospect that was the inevitability of Ferguson. Decades of grievance-mongering have rendered the vast majority of white Americans deaf to the message of the civil rights industry—for industry it has become, a corporation whose most important product is outrage. But the average white American, say some working stiff who lost a $50,000 job in 2009 and finally landed a $35,000 job in 2012, has problems of his own and isn’t particularly sympathetic to cries of woe from other quarters, even when they’re justified in whole or in part.
Where did America go wrong on race? Back in the Sixties the civil rights movement was a noble endeavor that did arouse the conscience of the nation and did bring about a profound, positive change in race relations. Perhaps that’s hard to remember now, when the movement is personified by grifters and charlatans like the Rev. Al Sharpton. And perhaps too, the turn from nobility came early, in reaction to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Even before his death, King had been reviled by those to the left of him in the movement, people for whom revolutionary change, not reform, was the ideal. He was scorned for his willingness to work within the system and excoriated for his rejection of violence in pursuit of justice. All this is mostly forgotten now that King has evolved into a secular saint. But I believe that the movement with which his name is indelibly associated had strayed onto the downward path even before he was gunned down.
The real problems and genuine grievances of black America are easy for white Americans to ignore nowadays, crowded out as they are by the hucksterism of the civil-rights industry. That white working-class stiff may not be politically sophisticated but he’s quite acute enough to spot the hypocrisy of activists who scream about police shootings of young black males while turning a blind eye to the epidemic of homicide in black urban centers. Since the incident in Ferguson there have been 855 shootings in Chicago alone, 130 of them fatal, and the vast majority of both shooters and victims were black. In progressive quarters such statistics are virtually unmentionable and to cite them is to court charges of racism. The facts cannot be suppressed, however. White Americans view black outrage over police shootings in the light of those facts and judge it hypocritical.
On the other hand, blacks view all shootings by white police officers of unarmed, black young men as unjustified, racially motivated and criminal. The calls for “justice” that arise from the black community on such occasions are demands for summary justice: the immediate and speedy conviction of the police officer concerned, regardless of the evidence, with threats of disorder and violence should the desired outcome not materialize. What happened in Ferguson was a textbook demonstration of this syndrome.
Now of course the feelings of the black community in Ferguson are understandable, as is their skepticism that the system will produce a just result. But these feelings are greatly magnified and grotesquely distorted by the civil-rights industry, with its promiscuous charges of racism and threats of violence. In Ferguson, as is usual in such cases, these charges and threats smothered the evidence. That Darren Wilson was a racist cop who for no particular reason shot a black youth in the back and killed him, and that Michael Brown was an innocent gentle giant who had done nothing wrong, became unquestioned dogma. And, of course, if you exclude the progressive elites there wasn’t a single white person in America who believes any of it.
As it happens, the evidence is strong that Brown assaulted Wilson and then, when the latter attempted to arrest him, refused to comply with the officer’s commands and charged him. Wilson thereupon shot Brown to death. This was the conclusion of the grand jury and the reason that no indictment of Wilson was issued. But if the facts had been otherwise—if the evidence showed that Wilson has executed Brown—the respective attitudes of blacks and whites would have remained substantially the same. That is, blacks would still have sided with the victim, whites with the cop.
In short, among white Americans the civil-rights industry has lost all credibility. And since the civil-rights industry is the public voice of American blacks, that dismissal extends to black America. And it extends most specifically to Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the United States, whose pronouncements on Ferguson— and on issues of race generally—make no impression on white America. One can easily imagine what Dr. Martin Luther King would make of this sorry situation. But today’s black leaders, well, they seem to be just fine with it.
