Just when you think our country’s treatment of race can’t become any more dishonest and hypocritical, along comes the Zimmerman verdict, about which come various dismal thoughts: That the hysterical reaction of many liberals to the verdict reflects a betrayal of the rule of law that used to define liberalism.
After all, if guilty was the only acceptable verdict, as many liberals claim, then why did we ever bother with a trial with judge and jury in the first place? Why not just grab a rope and find the nearest tree instead? Oh yes … that used to happen, didn’t it? And so how is the logic contained in the liberal demands for “justice” any different from that, only with the racial labels now reversed?
That the silliest claims of all were those suggesting that it is now “open season” on young black males.
Unless I’ve missed something, no mobs in white hoods brandishing torches have been seen moving down the main streets of Little Rock or Memphis since George Zimmerman was found not guilty. And the reason we don’t see such things (any more, at least) is because about the rarest form of violence in American life is white on black.
According to official FBI statistics, black teenagers like Trayvon Martin are 13 times more likely to be killed by other black teenagers than by non-Hispanic whites. And blacks are more likely to kill whites than the other way around. In short, the greatest threat to the lives of young black men isn’t a racist legal system or chubby security guards, but other young black men.
But why let such statistics and facts get in the way of a psychologically comforting racial narrative, even if we have to invent the concept of “white Hispanic” to make it somehow fit?
The unavoidable truth is that white racism has declined dramatically in recent decades, to such an extent that incidents of white-on-black violence become newsworthy only because they’re so rare.
That it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton care a lot less about the condition of black Americans than they do about finding evidence of white racism (somewhere, anywhere!) with which to perpetuate their race-hustling careers.
As such, amid all their reckless accusations about racism, when was the last time Jackson or Sharpton mentioned that the black illegitimacy rate has now topped 70 percent? Or made any effort to discuss the reasons behind persistent and debilitating black educational failure? Or tried to explain in any meaningful way the absurdly high crime rate for young black males that leads to racial profiling?
Far easier for such charlatans (and their white liberal enablers) to spew vague charges of “ institutional racism” and “the return of Jim Crow” than to face the real problems afflicting America’s black communities, most of which have little to do with the racism scapegoat.
As Shelby Steele put it in a recent column on thecorruption of the black civil-rights establishment: “There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer, but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority.” That a particularly interesting bit of survey research on race relations happened to be released just before the Zimmerman verdict, courtesy of Rasmussen Associates. The striking part-that blacks are more likely to see most blacks as racist than theyare most whites. And that the only group among respondents who felt that whites were more racist than blacks was self-identified liberals.
Summarizing the findings in his Wall Street Journal column, James Taranto noted that “the people likeliest to believe most whites are racist and most blacks are not are those who are both liberal and white,” suggesting that “a lot of what drives the futile debate over race in America is white liberals’ psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites.”
In other words, white racism may have declined over time, but the need for white liberals to believe in it clearly hasn’t.
That perhaps the most irresponsible performance in the whole Zimmerman case was turned in not by the usual suspects (Jackson, Sharpton, et al.) but by our own “white black” president (to use the New York Times’ novel racial classification system).
With the highest office in the land should come responsibility and restraint, but from his inflammatory “If I had a son he would have looked like Trayvon” opening comments to his “I could have been Trayvon” post-verdict press conference, Barack Obama only served to exacerbate the racial divisions surrounding the incident.
How sad, because so many Americans expected his election to help heal such divisions. Instead, it has made race relations worse, largely because our president and his supporters can’t resist playing the race card in order to rev up his base and discredit criticism of his job performance.
All of which leaves us with the obvious question-if America is so intrinsically racist, as Obama apparently believes, how did he get elected? And then re-elected four years later?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 07/29/2013