This is the final of three posts I am making at the outset on this important topic. While this is one of the most important topics today and I am certain I will be writing on the topic in the future, these three lay out my basic ideas on race relations historically and today.
First, Happy Juneteenth or Emancipation Day. While this has been a state holiday in 46 states, curiously Hawaii, a very blue state was not one of them, the federal government just declared it a national holiday this week and is being celebrated this week. While I am not sure that giving federal employees another paid day off from work is the best way to celebrate, I think it is wonderful that we recognize a significant day in our country’s history, the emancipation of African-American slaves in America. This was first celebrated informally in Texas in 1865, formally in 1980, the first state to have it as a formal holiday. Rather appropriate that this Republican state was the first since it was the Republican party that led the fight to end slavery while, as i pointed out in my last post, it was the Democrat party that led the Confederacy. Thank God that today the Democrats now agree with Republicans that Blacks should have the same rights and dignity as all other people. The problem is that we have fundamental disagreements on how this is accomplished.
I endeavor to write the truth. Some times this means exposing lies. There are several huge lies that are destroying race relations today. The first is that the country is systemically racist and, specifically, that all police forces are racists. Lying underneath this is the current vogue to teach our children Critical Race Theory (CRT). In my previous post I have already discussed the lie that the Great Society and related welfare programs are helping the Black community. In actuality these programs are destroying the foundations of this community. Let me start with alleged racism of the police.
In the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd the nation went up in flames and we are still living with the consequences. Efforts to defund and misguided attempts to reform policing, such as removing limited liability for police. Up front let’s be straight on one thing, there is a greater chance that a young Black man will die from a lightning bolt than in a police shooting. In fact, more Whites are killed in police actions every year than Black, while admittedly the proportion compared to the general population is greater. Of course, so is the proportion of Blacks committing violent crime. This is not a condemnation, just a fact we should be addressing. Police shootings have been going down for a long time. Second, in many of the cases, such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, the police acted appropriately. This is not the judgement of some right wing nut case, rather the judgement of Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder. Michael Brown never said, “Hands up, don’t shoot”, but you would not know that if you saw the riots and protests of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in the years since he was shot. The truth is the vast majority of police officers serve to protect lives, all lives. The removal of limited liability will further impair their ability to do their jobs as it will leave them open to lawsuit from every arrested person. How hard would you involve yourself in an ongoing crime if you knew that you could get sued for doing so? Finally on the police, look at the cities where the mayors say their police forces are systemically racist. Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore ,St. Louis, Chicago, LA, New York and Atlanta stand out. What do they all have in common? They have all been run by liberal Democrats for at least 50 years, with the exception of New York under Guilliana and Bloomberg (a period of reducing crime and homicide rates. DeBlasio has fixed that.) Particularly look at Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered. It is arguably one of the most liberal cities in the country. Minnesota, settled by the tolerant Swedes, was so liberal they would not affiliate with the Democrat party, perhaps because of their legacy of racism and slavery, they formed their own party, the Democrat Farm Labor Party, which is still their branch of the Democrats today. This is the home of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. How in the world could this state and city have created a systemically racist police force? If they did and the mayors and governors knew it, why did it take a murder and riots to address it? Same could be said for uber liberal Seattle and Portland. How about Atlanta? Not only have they had Democrat mayors for generations, since the 1970’s the mayor and police chiefs have been all most all Black? They created and tolerated systemically racist police forces? No. This is a lie that is advancing some political goal. I don’t know for certain what that goal is, but the ensuing rises in crimes and murder could lead to a justification for a national police force. Go that route and then look out for your civil liberties. Already Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago is asking for federal intervention to help stem a rising murder rate she has been helping to rise. In the meantime, with the assault on police going on, who is paying the price? Blacks. Chicago’s murder rate, almost exclusively Blacks, was 769 in 2020, a 55% increase over a very deadly 2019. Furthermore 79 police officers were shot at. Given this level of murder violence against police, it is surprising not more people were killed by police. I would say it shows how much restraint police typically demonstrate. Unfortunately these rising murder rates of Blacks is occurring all over the country in large, Democrat led urban areas. The response to people dying at these rates is not to defund the police, it should be to reinforce and support the police. The BLM organization does not care about black lives, if it did it would not call for defunding police and actively destroying businesses in the Black community, thus costing Black jobs. They are a Marxist organization trying to destroy the American way of life. Every time a person buys a BLM flag, tee shirt, yard sign, etc. they are providing funds to hurt Blacks and undermine our free democracy.
CRT is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the concept in which race is a socially constructed category ingrained in American law intended to maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites. It holds that the U.S. society is inherently or systemically racist. In our classrooms our children are being taught that all whites are racist and all whites are responsible for all injustices that have been perpetrated against people of color. In short, you will be judged on the basis of your skin color, not the content of your character. What must Rev. Dr. King be thinking today? what a perversion of his dream. When I was in school I was certainly taught about the evils of slavery and other problems in our history. However I was also taught that our form of government allowed for and encouraged for those problems to be corrected. If you are preordained by your skin color to be a certain type of person, what good is free will? Where is there a role for individual action and responsibility for those actions? I won’t say anymore about CRT except that it is evil and destructive to healthy relationships between people of different color. Our goal as a society should still be to become a color blind society.
Here are some of the problems I see with the liberal elites’ view of Black people as being just a group that need help. Let’s start with voter integrity issues. It seems just common sense that we should require a valid photo ID to vote. To not have this creates a huge range of possible fraud. The reason we are told is that Black people are too ignorant to obtain ID’s. We never are told any statistics to back this assertion up, but it is extremely insulting. You need ID to drive, buy alcohol, get medical care, today to get the vaccination that the elites want to make mandatory for everyone, to fly and a thousand other things. Black people do none of these things? Not only insulting, it is plain crazy and just an excuse, at the Black community’s expense, to make voter fraud easier. More on this in a future post. Another problem is in education. I will discuss this in greater detail later, but we all know that there are problems in education within the Black community. The answer is never how do work to get people up to standards, no the liberal answer is to lower the standards for Blacks. Who does this benefit. You have states like California and Washington that are telling teachers that teaching traditional, linear math is racist. There is too much emphasis on correct answers and showing work. You don’t need to have a doctorates in education to know this only hurts the students as it would only lead to Blacks even declining further in job opportunities, particularly in the growing STEM fields. There is also an effort being made to lower the admission standards for Blacks when enrolling at universities, particularly elite colleges. This has people attending colleges where they cannot truly compete, they fall behind, become frustrated and drop out. Who won with this scheme, the university administrators who compliment themselves on the size of their minority enrollment in their freshmen classes? Studies show that Blacks who enroll in these universities after meeting the normal standards perform just fine. Meanwhile there are plenty of other, less rigorous universities where the others could have gotten very good educations. The elites are not looking for ways to help Blacks succeed, just ways they can make themselves feel good about themselves and exert more control over people of color. In employment there is always the taint that a person got their job due to their skin color rather than their merit. This degrades otherwise good employees their pride and dignity. Collectively, these concepts show a complete lack of respect and regard for people of color. They are insulting and very harmful to these people, their communities and society as a whole.
For the last 6 years I have volunteered, through a charity of which I am a board member, in a predominately Black and Hispanic neighborhood. The organization is Renewal Neighborhood Ministry, which was formed through a partnership of my church and one in the neighborhood. One of our primary activities, and the one in which I have spent the most time, is tutoring elementary school children in one of Indianapolis’s failing schools. I mention this not get any credit as I do not do that do that much. I mention it just to say I am not unfamiliar with some of the problems in this high murder rate neighborhood. I have observed and learned many lessons. First and foremost, we are all just people with the same aspirations. I have also seen first hand the problems created when people are taught and incented to be dependent upon the state rather than their own initiative. I am not saying we should not help our fellow man as this is a basic tenet of my Christian faith. However this dependency creates apathy and a belief that someone else will fix my problems. This is particularly noticeable to me in education. Education is the key to raising people out of poverty. Without it you can do little in life. While I certainly find fault with many of the practices of the Indianapolis Public School (IPS) system, there is also a societal problem. First off, there is almost a complete lack of Fathers in the homes. Disastrous for kids, particularly the boys. A single Mom, or today in many homes, a single Grandmother, is in a tough position to do everything on her own. Second, there seems to be a belief that their children’s education is the sole responsibility of the school. Everyone who has ever been a parent knows this is not true. It starts with reading to your toddlers and challenging them at every step of their education. In our experience this happens very rarely with our Black parents. Some yes, but not most. I am not blaming these parents, it is what they have been taught and that is not only wrong it is destructive. Interestingly, when you look at the stats, IPS spends more per student than any other school district in the state and has one of the best student to teacher ratios. The district is about 80% Black and their test scores are abominable. We are told by school officials that the goal is to have 70% of their students at or above grade level. The most recent results for IPS are about 20% for both Math and Reading. In the school where we tutor the end of year results are 2% for Math and 0% for Reading. 0%. Does anyone believe if kids can’t read at grade level at the end of elementary school there will be some miraculous improvement in junior and senior high? Of course not. What will happen is increasing frustration and anger. Is this lack of educational attainment due to racism when the school district spends quite a bit on each student an has a reasonably healthy proportion of teachers to students? I am not an expert, but I think any reasonable observer would have to say that there is a family and societal problem that has nothing to do with current racism.
My final point is what is the sense of turning everyone into either victims or oppressors? As I have said before, if you are a victim of white racism, the only people that can change your reality are white people. In other words, if you consider yourself a victim you have given up your ability to improve your life This denial of personal responsibility is healthy? Second, how do we come together as one society if we are stuck in these assigned dichotomies? We need to increasingly see each other as unique individuals with or own views, needs and aspirations. No one should just be assigned a role based upon the color of their skin or any other physical characteristic for which we had no control. A Black person is not an Uncle Tom simply because they don’t accept the progressive elite agenda. They are free thinkers and should be praised not for their thoughts, but the fact that they are their own thoughts. Similarly, you are not a racist, even unconsciously, just because you are White. It is often said that we need to have a dialogue between people of different races. I fully agree and seek opportunities to do so. You learn a lot. However, shouting at one another and calling each other names, including White Supremacist, does not advance the dialogue. I asked Black man the first day I went to the elementary school, “How can an old white guy help out in this neighborhood?” This man, who has become a good friend and spiritual advisor to me said, “You do it by not acting like all the White people who have come here before that think they know what the problems are and, worse, they know what the answers are to those problems. You do it by listening and learning how you can be of help.” I consider my friend George to be a very wise man. I would recommend his advice to anyone that is serious about improving race relations. Talk to people, not racial groups. The bottom line is that we are people who have the same dreams and aspirations. Those are best accomplished through equal opportunity, not equity programs, education, a moral or spiritual influence and taking personal responsibility for our outcomes. Being a victim makes one helpless and dependent. Being an oppressor just makes you evil. This is a false and negative paradigm and people of good intent have got to fight back against it.