Another young black male shot and killed by a police officer. That the young black male was armed and the officer was also black didn't prevent parts of Milwaukee from going up in flames.
Because it isn't and never has been about facts, it's only about preserving the liberal narrative of pervasive white racism, of which police shootings of black males are but one manifestation (even if the white folks didn't play their assigned role this time around). That is the only way we are allowed to talk about race. Deviate from it, even with facts and data on your side, and you are a racist too.
For the sake of argument let us concede that lingering white racism remains an obstacle to black progress--it would, after all, be profoundly ahistorical to attempt to explain present-day circumstances without reference to slavery and Jim Crow. To paraphrase John Paul Vann, racism might be 10 or 90 percent of the problem, but it is (or once was) the first 10 or 90 percent.
But it is also possible to argue that some of the most serious obstacles hindering black progress actually have little to do with such racism, and were perhaps even put in place over time by those claiming to fight against it. Included on any such list should be the following:
• The "Race Card": The more it has been played by opportunistic white liberals and black race-hustlers, the more it encourages cynicism and prevents that urgent national conversation on race that we are told is necessary. If just about everything is racist, then nothing is, and the real thing is let off the hook.
When a racist is anyone winning an argument with a liberal, you know the concept has been mischievously redefined.
• Affirmative Action: What started out as an admirable desire to hire and promote underprivileged blacks was transmuted over time into rigid racial preferences and quotas, thereby tragically undermining the single most important principle of the civil rights movement itself--people should be treated the same, regardless of race.
• The doctrine of "disparate impact": Disparate-impact jurisprudence begins with something that has never existed in any society (proportionate racial outcomes) and then, equally absurdly, concludes that the failure of such outcomes to materialize is de facto proof of racism.
Thus is born the legal foundation for preferences and quotas, as businesses and municipalities reluctantly adopt them in order to avoid disparate-impact lawsuits.
• Rising illegitimacy: When Pat Moynihan sounded the alarm on the decline of the black family more than 50 years ago, the black illegitimacy rate was a troubling 25 percent. It is now approaching 75 percent. And with it have come educational failure, crime, and a vicious cycle of multigenerational poverty.
• Welfare dependency: That exploding illegitimacy rate didn't happen all of its own accord. It began to take off precisely when Lyndon Johnson initiated his "war on poverty" and set about dramatically expanding the size and generosity of the welfare state, a central component of which was paying poor young (disproportionately black) women to have children out of wedlock. As social scientist Charles Murray argued, when you subsidize something, you get more of it.
• Democratic Party dominance of the black vote: The black vote, which actually tilted Republican into the 1930s and remained competitive between our parties even as late as the 1950s, has become absolutely crucial to Democratic electoral prospects, a fact which provides Democrats with incentives to exacerbate racial tensions and accuse whites of racism in order to win black votes. If white racism somehow suddenly disappeared, Democrats would have to find a way to recreate it.
• The GOP ceding the black vote: Republicans wrote off the black vote decades ago on the assumption that they couldn't compete when it came to playing the race card and welfare-state pandering. They're right; they can't, and shouldn't.
But as Thomas Sowell recently pointed out, the GOP has a potential advantage on two issues--education and crime--of great concern to black families. Blacks are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, and their kids are also disproportionately hurt by poor inner-city schools.
One would think Republicans could make some inroads on the basis of such issues; winning just 20 percent of the black vote instead of 5 percent would reshuffle the political deck and make it possible to help black families in ways that Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson never have.
• The racism of low expectations: The assumption that white racism causes all black problems comes with the inference that blacks are perpetual victims and therefore can't be held to the same standards of conduct as other groups. Slave owners used to defend slavery by arguing that their slaves couldn't fend for themselves if freed; the rhetoric on today's liberal plantations is eerily similar.
Studying hard in school, working for a living, getting married before having kids and obeying the law aren't just "white" values; they are universal requirements for progress in life.
And we do a great (and genuinely racist) disservice to members of any racial or ethnic group, including blacks, when we assume otherwise.
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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 on 08/29/2016