Black Lives Matter, Obama, and Race

           The nation has been convulsed by riots and violent protests in a string of cities, a pattern of lawlessness and breakdown that does not bode well for the nation, the rule of law, or race relations.  In every case, President Barack Obama has exploited these events for political purposes, pouring fuel, in effect, on the fire.  The incidents involved encounters between police and inner city blacks, beginning with Ferguson.  They have since spread across the land to include Baltimore, New York, Minneapolis, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and most recently Milwaukee.  In so doing, our first black President took up a narrative that he continues to promote.  This narrative defines modern liberalism, the Democrat Party, the media, the Academy, and the left in general.  It holds that America is institutionally and irredeemably racist, and no amount of progress will ever wipe the slate clean.  It maintains that there are no other explanations that account for disparities between blacks and whites.  Specifically, it points to alleged racism in our law enforcement and criminal justice systems, but it fans out to indict the whole of American society.  

            In almost every encounter, Obama and many other prominent Democrats and the media, have engaged in race baiting, stoking the flames of racial hatred in ways that have been destructive of the civil society and deadly to our police and communities. While decrying violence on the one hand Obama has given a wink and nod to its most violent proponents, chief of which is Black Lives Matter, the racist, black supremacist group that promotes cop-killing and, for good measure, anti-Semitism, an organization he refuses to condemn.  Instead, in his rhetoric, he has implied systemic racism in our law enforcement and criminal justice systems, smearing as racist our 18,000 police departments and 750,000 police officers many of whom work in inner cities and are black.  

            Yet despite efforts by liberals to demonstrate racial bias, they have always come up short.  Instead, they have shown that policing, prosecution, and incarceration accurately reflect crime rates not bias.  Nationally, blacks were charged with 67% of all robberies, 57% of all murders, and 45% of all assaults in the 75 largest US counties in 2009, although making up only 15% of the populations of those counties.  In NYC, blacks commit over 75% of all shootings, 70% of all robberies while constituting 23% of the city’s population.  Blacks commit over 50% of all murders nationally, more than committed by whites and Hispanics combined even though blacks comprise only 13% of the population. (From Heather MacDonald) The problem is criminality not racism. 

            But there is an explanation for the high crime and incarceration rates of blacks in America’s inner cities that the left chooses to ignore.  It is the failed social welfare policies of the Democrat Party and the left.  It is broken families and dysfunctional cultures.  It is fatherlessness and a soaring illegitimacy rate.  It is welfare dependency, educational failure, unemployment, poverty, the erosion of personal responsibility and morality, and bad life decisions.  It is the fifty-year inculcation since “Great Society” of a permanent underclass with underclass values, and the fragmented, crime ridden, impoverished communities it has spawned. 

            Race defines liberalism today and all that flows from it, an ideology of victimhood and grievance - and how to exploit it for money, votes, and political power.  The race baiting left has plundered this narrative, farmed white guilt, harvested the social pathologies of the black community, most of which have nothing to do with racism, and grown and prospered.  It has twisted the race legend into new shapes and forms to include other victim groups.  It has invested its energies in the victim fable, the slave and the oppressor myth, in all its varied manifestations, and won.  The victim-race narrative equals liberalism today.  The black community has largely followed its message; it has been led into a house of poverty and despair.     

            It is critical to challenge the Democrat Party and its miserable record of collapse and disintegration in our cities, which they have controlled for decades.  They should be condemned for the fate of so many in the black community under its rule.  Their ideology holds that there is no hope for blacks in racist America.  That the cards are stacked against them.  And that blacks require government assistance to survive.  It is a destructive message that conservatives must counter with the ennobling philosophy of liberty, private property, family and faith, free market capitalism, and self-reliance.  Twenty two trillion dollars since the Great Society has not made a dent in poverty.  Instead, it has created a permanent underclass with all its attendant dysfunction, which includes high rates of criminality and incarceration.  The leftist message of failure and dependency must be rejected for the sake of blacks, whites, and the entire country.