April 15, 2012 - 12:27 pm- by Victor Davis Hanson
<http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/bio/>
Polls show that the Trayvon Martin case has split the country apart over
perceptions of race and justice, in ways that may dwarf the polarities
of the O.J. Simpson trial days of 1994. Or does the new friction simply
reflect an ongoing erosion in relations since 2009? Or is it all hype,
and things are still about as they were?
This tension was not supposed to have increased with the election of
Barack Obama, who ran on “healing” and “unity,” and who was proclaimed
by supporters as ushering in a new post-racial age.
Here I list a few random examples of the new racial furies and conclude
with the two irreconcilable narratives.
*The Trayvon Martin Tragedy*
Hollywood director Spike Lee tweeted what he thought was George
Zimmerman’s address, in hopes, apparently, that vigilantes might
assemble there. Ex-boxer Mike Tyson called for George Zimmerman’s death;
the New Black Panther Party put a “dead or alive” bounty on his head,
confident that there would never be a state or federal charge of
conspiracy to commit a felony lodged against them. I think all these
examples were more or less open calls for violence.
Many of the publicly reported “facts” of the yet to be tried Martin case
really were in error and in error by design. Indeed, George Zimmerman
was not white; he really did have head injuries; he did not employ a
racial epithet on tape; he did not voluntarily profile on tape Martin as
a “black”; there was indeed an altercation; Mr. Martin was not a
preteen, tiny, and a model student; Zimmerman did not outweigh Martin by
100 pounds.
But such constructs were all necessary for the narrative of a white
Germanic-sounding vigilante, who, after uttering racial slurs, executed
a little African-American boy, then lied about a fight and injuries, and
got off due to a racist police department and by extension a racist
America. We don’t know what happened (murder, manslaughter,
self-defense?), only that the above narrative did not happen. Most agree
that when one party is shot, killed, and was not armed, then the
evidence must be carefully reviewed to substantiate a self-defense plea;
the objection is not to the review but to the prejudging of the review
and public threats.
*The Race Establishment*
The problem with the race establishment is not its acrimony per se, but
(a) that the acrimony is frozen in amber around 1960, with no
acknowledgment of some 50 years of federal action and three new
generations of Americans, and (b) the inordinate time invested in
blaming “them” rather than spent on introspection on how to achieve
parity with a majority culture in the manner of other minorities’
successes. Or at least that is how I perceive the growing anger at the
Sharpton/Jackson/Black Caucus nexus.
One day, Rev. Wright, the president’s former pastor, is once again
railing against Jews and whites; while on the next, Louis Farrakhan
tours the country warning of the dangers of racial intermarriage and
declaring Jesus a black man. No one rebukes such overt hatred. Revs.
Jackson and Sharpton, as is their wont, flew to the center of the Martin
case controversy, to be photographed and to “organize.” Al Sharpton is
now rebooted from the days of his involvement in the Crown Heights and
Freddy’s Fashion Mart cases. No one wishes to remember his derogatory
comments about homosexuals, Jews, and Mormons, much less the Tawana
Brawley matter in which he lost a defamation case after falsely accusing
a state prosecutor of being one of the assailants. He has a nightly
MSNBC show where he reports on his earlier daytime heroics; in some
sense, he has eclipsed Jesse Jackson as the black community’s premier
civil rights leader. I say that without irony but based on the official
praise from the country’s leading officials.
Attorney General Eric Holder lauded the defamer of state prosecutors
“for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to
speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine
a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must
fulfill,” and said of the ongoing Trayvon Martin case: “I know that many
of you are greatly — and rightly — concerned about the recent shooting
death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a young man whose future has been
lost to the ages.” Holder’s “lost to the ages” quote bookends the
president’s comment that Martin resembled the son he might have had.
Whether those editorials will influence the jury pool in Florida no one
knows, but I cannot remember a president and attorney general
editorializing about a local criminal case before it has even gone to
trial. If before the O.J. trial Bill Clinton had said that Nicole
Simpson looked like the daughter he might have had, or had Janet Reno
said Nicole was lost to the ages, well, fill in the blanks.
Holder himself almost seems to enjoy expressing his racial passions
(e.g., “cowards,” “my people,” his allegations of racism against
congressional overseers in the Fast and Furious inquiry, his accusations
of racial profiling against the Arizona immigration law, which he
confessed that he had not yet read, etc.). He chose not to prosecute the
New Black Panther Party for voter intimation. Nor, apparently, has he
much concern with the latter’s bounty on Zimmerman–or its radio
station’s calls for a race war. If John Ashcroft had said anything
similar, or had even Alberto Gonzales, proverbial hell would have broken
loose.
*From the Very Top*
This attention to racial division is not new with this increasingly
desperate administration. Before a Latino audience, President Obama
blasted congressional Republicanism and soared with the following
statement: “America should be a place where you can always make it if
you try; a place where every child, no matter what they look like, where
they come from, should have a chance to succeed.” The “look like”
formula was popular and used also by First Lady Michelle Obama, who had
also complained about a description of her White House infighting,
written by a /New York Times/ reporter: “That’s been an image that
people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack
announced, that I’m some angry black woman.” None of these comments was
helpful in erasing away the old “never been proud,” “raise the bar,” and
“downright mean country” campaign tropes of 2008.
When Rick Perry referred to “a big black cloud that hangs over America —
that debt, that is so monstrous,” charges of racism flew. Chris Matthews
referred to Perry’s support of federalism with the quip “this is going
to be Bull Connor with a smile.” At some point, every Republican nominee
was alleged to be waging a racialist campaign, as we heard that
Gingrich’s food stamp references were racist and still more about the
segregationist past of Romney’s Mormon Church.
In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, Obama called on
“young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women . . . to stand
together once again.” Shortly before the November 2010 congressional
elections, Obama told an audience that Republicans “are counting on
black folks staying home.” Before the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama
affected the supposed accent of black America in emphasizing shared
race: “Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We’ve got
work to do.” Was “we” the black community or all of America? He appealed
to Latino voters not to stay home from the 2010 elections, but instead
to “punish our enemies”—and not to fall prey to the Republicans’
“cynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting.” Conservatives,
remember, wished, according to the president, to round up Latino
children while eating ice cream. There is now an African Americans for
Obama campaign group, and Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith warns us that
he has Obama’s back.
All this is not quite new. Obama stereotyped the Cambridge Police
Department as having “acted stupidly” for detaining Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates. He allegedly complained that racial bias explains
much of the Tea Party opposition to his own administration, and used the
derogatory “tea-baggers” sexual slur to characterize the protests. After
Rev. Wright, the clingers speech, and “typical white person,” one would
have thought that Obama would have tended to avoid the question of
racial tensions.
Members of the Black Caucus have talked a lot about the Trayvon Martin
case, calling it an “assassination” and a “murder” and alleging that
Zimmerman shot Martin down like “a dog.” This too is not new in the age
of Obama. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said debt arguments showed racial
animosity toward Barack Obama. Rep. Barbara Lee accused Republicans in
racist fashion of trying to deny blacks the vote. Rep. Andre Carson
claimed that the Tea Party wished to lynch blacks from trees. Rep.
Charles Rangel alleged that Rick Perry’s job creation in Texas was “one
stage away from slavery,”
Post-racial icons like Morgan Freeman blasted opposition to Obama with
“It’s a racist thing.” Whoopi Goldberg blurted out, “I’m playing the
damn [race] card” over Obama’s sinking polls.
*Why?*
I could go on and on, but one gets the message. So why the anger at this
point and not, say, in 2007, when the evil Bush was president and Obama
was but a weak senator and a dubious presidential candidate? For eight
years there were African-American secretaries of state. Bush, through
his African AIDS initiatives, saved millions of blacks who had no access
to medicine. Minorities were visible in his cabinet. No one objected to
the fact that Obama garnered 96% of the black vote, or thought much
about it when, in the bitter Democratic primaries, the Clintons alleged
that race was used to whip up support against them. So why, then, the
anger now, when things should have improved even more?
And I do not mean just African-American anger. To read comments
following these stories on the Internet is to enter the world of white
counter-rage at a level I have never seen. We talk of black accusations
of racism, but they are earning a counter-response that is equally
scary, with some irate and others wearied to the point of quietism and
isolation. The lurid Drudge Report weekly posts videos of
African-American teens flash mobbing or attacking and beating whites, in
not so subtle reminders that in terms of violent crime blacks commit
roughly 50% of the offenses, while making up only 11-13% of the
population, and are 7-8 times more likely to harm whites than vice
versa. Indeed, 94% of all blacks who are murdered each year die at the
hands of blacks. The more Eric Holder emphasizes racial distinctions,
the more he seems oblivious to the fact that he is alienating far more
than he is encouraging.
*What Is It All About?*
Two racial narratives without much hope of a compromise seem behind
these different views:
A) The current black leadership believes in the following narrative: Due
to the wages of past American racism and well over a century of Southern
chattel slavery, blacks have been damaged in ways still underappreciated
by whites. Thus, true equal opportunity and justice will take decades
more of instruction, recompense, affirmative action, and set-asides to
achieve real fairness. Whites say that they are not racist, but daily
they do or say things that to others seem very racist. One can be
destructively racist without the overtness of Jim Crow.
When blacks employ the N-word, or a Rev. Wright uses racist language, or
the Black Caucus (or Black Panther Party) employs incendiary vocabulary
that would earn their white counterparts ostracism, all that is a false
equivalence. One must see this apparent asymmetry as a faux-asymmetry,
given the hurt in the black community that suddenly in 2012 cannot quite
be held to the same standards as the inheritors and present
beneficiaries of privilege. If 50% of the black community has achieved
near parity in the half-century since the civil rights reforms, 50% have
not, largely due to the unwillingness of the majority culture to invest
the necessary resources and alter attitudes to finish the job of racial
parity. Therefore continued federal reparatory action is necessary until
100% parity is achieved, to paraphrase Eric Holder. If black crime is
inordinately high, it is largely because of either present racism or the
legacy of racism or both, and continues on due to the general neglect of
the white majority, who objects only when the violence spills into their
own enclaves. As for other minorities, they have suffered from white
racism and may have transcended it, but slavery was a special case and
left an imprint on the American psyche that explains the sensitivity of
black/white relations in ways unlike other racial and ethnic polarities.
*Versus*
B) The counter-narrative is just as uncompromising. It runs I think as
this: We live in a multi-racial society now, where almost every minority
group has genuine claims on past exploitation, from the Holocaust to the
frontier wars to the internment. But after a half-century of hyphenation
and racial identity politics, and a trillion dollars spent on federal
race-based programs, it is time to move beyond race and evaluate
Americans on their behaviors and talents, without worry whether any
particular group statistically does better than another–especially given
that race itself in the 21st century is problematic with intermarriage
and the waves of new immigrants. If we do not, our future is Rwanda,the
Middle East, or the Balkans.
Millions of so-called whites are now adults who grew up in the age of
affirmative action, and have no memory of systemic discrimination. To
the degree some avoid certain schools, neighborhoods, or environments,
they do so only on the basis of statistics, not profiling, that suggest
a higher incidence of inner-city violence and crime. Most in this
generation assume that a B+ white student in state college has none of
the chances to get into law school, medical school, or graduate programs
that a B- African-American student enjoys. If the black leadership were
to preach a more balanced message of both monitoring race-based
discrimination while addressing more vigorously endemic pathologies in
the inner cities (such as illegitimacy, absentee fatherhood, drug use,
crime, violence, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism), most racism would
eventually disappear—as black crime rates, graduation rates, or
illegitimacy rates matched those of the general public. Liberal whites
and black elites profile as much as anyone (consider where they live,
where they put their children in schools, and the fact that they
associate with those quite distant from the inner city).
The phenomenal success of Asians, Punjabis, Armenians, Arabs, Latin
Americans, and other supposedly non Anglo-Saxon groups is proof that the
majority culture holds no one back on the basis of skin color. The crux
for every group is culture, not skin color. Unfortunately, “racism” has
become a careerist tool that leads to political and professional
advantage when the charge is leveled; if there are indeed two black
Americas, then the elite often uses the plight of the non-elite as
arguments for its own claim to exemptions from criticism and often
advantages in admissions and hiring.
Those two narrative don’t match and won’t, and so race relations have
gotten only worse—as Barack Obama and Eric Holder well know. They do not
seem to care or feel there is advantage to be had in the new polarity.
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