The Shameful Liberal
Exploitation of the Charleston Massacre
by Heather Mac Donald July 1, 2015 4:00 AM
The racist massacre of nine black worshippers at a
Charleston, S.C., church on June 17 was an act of such heinous ugliness that it
demands to be scrutinized for any larger meanings it may possess. That the
victims had graciously welcomed the murderer, Dylann Roof, to their Bible study
class at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church and had politely sat with him for nearly an
hour before he started shooting makes their killings all the more
heart-wrenching. Given America’s history of racial terror, including attacks on
black churches, it is appropriate to ask humbly, with trepidation, whether the
shooting reflects currents of hate that are still active in American culture.
It is not, however, appropriate to answer that question with boilerplate
rhetoric that bears little resemblance to reality.
An honest appraisal of race relations today would conclude
that the Charleston massacre belongs to the outermost, lunatic fringe of
American society. The country’s revulsion at the carnage was immediate and
universal, resulting in a justified movement to banish the Confederate flag,
embraced by Roof as a white-supremacist symbol, from official sites. Roof was
not expressing the will of anyone beyond his own narcissistic, twisted self.
White-supremacist killings are not a common aspect of black life today; their very
rarity is what made this atrocity so newsworthy.
And yet the Democratic elites, from President Obama on down,
opportunistically turned Roof into a stand-in for white America, linking his
rampage to the Left’s standard grab bag of institutional racism that allegedly
poisons black life. Eulogizing Emanuel A.M.E.’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa
C. Pinckney, on June 26, Obama fingered virtually every white as a potential
co-conspirator in the killings. “Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can
infect us even when we don’t realize it,” Obama said. In other words, it took
this violence for white America to wake up to its enduring racism, racism that
is continuous with Roof’s homicidal mania. Obama cautioned “us” (read: whites)
about other manifestations of “our” potentially lethal racism. Once we
“realize” how we are “infected” with bias, he said, we will be “guarding
against not just racial slurs, but . . . also . . . against the subtle impulse
to call Johnny back for an interview but not Jamal. So that we search our
hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens
to vote.” Obama’s admonition ignores the fact that in every elite workplace
today, whether a university, corporation, law firm, bank, foundation, newsroom,
or research lab, being black is an enormous advantage for a job applicant,
desperate as employers are to parade their “diversity” to a bean-counting
world. But even if that weren’t the case, job hiring has nothing to do with the
Roof massacre. And while one can debate the extent of voter fraud and the need
for additional measures to prevent it, it is preposterous to suggest that
someone seeking to strengthen vote-integrity rules needs to “search his heart”
for complicity in the Roof massacre.
Obama, however, marched on, leveraging the bloodshed to confirm other liberal tropes regarding a racist America. “Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.” Obama is yoking together disjoint realities. Even were the standard liberal narrative about poverty true, its alleged malefactors would still bear no responsibility for the Charleston horror.
But the standard liberal narrative is not true. The notorious “we” that has allegedly permitted “so many of our children to languish in poverty” and “attend dilapidated schools” has spent decades trying to eradicate black poverty. Welfare reform was a good-faith effort to break the cycle of intergenerational dependence. Republican politicians regularly churn out earnest policy wonkery and programs in the hope of raising more black children out of poverty. Black uplift remains an obsessive concern of white Republican philanthropists. I don’t know a single conservative donor who is not fervently trying to improve urban schools or provide scholarships in order to liberate pupils from that educational wasteland. That the educational establishment desperately and ludicrously caricatures those efforts as an attack on children does not make those initiatives any the less heartfelt.
Obama, however, marched on, leveraging the bloodshed to confirm other liberal tropes regarding a racist America. “Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.” Obama is yoking together disjoint realities. Even were the standard liberal narrative about poverty true, its alleged malefactors would still bear no responsibility for the Charleston horror.
But the standard liberal narrative is not true. The notorious “we” that has allegedly permitted “so many of our children to languish in poverty” and “attend dilapidated schools” has spent decades trying to eradicate black poverty. Welfare reform was a good-faith effort to break the cycle of intergenerational dependence. Republican politicians regularly churn out earnest policy wonkery and programs in the hope of raising more black children out of poverty. Black uplift remains an obsessive concern of white Republican philanthropists. I don’t know a single conservative donor who is not fervently trying to improve urban schools or provide scholarships in order to liberate pupils from that educational wasteland. That the educational establishment desperately and ludicrously caricatures those efforts as an attack on children does not make those initiatives any the less heartfelt.
Obama leveraged the bloodshed to
confirm liberal tropes regarding a racist America.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof anticipated Obama’s speech with his own leap from the shootings into liberal bromides. America’s greatest shame in 2015 is not the persistence of the Confederate flag in the South, Kristof wrote, but the fact that “almost two-thirds of black children grow up in low-income families.” Kristof saw this statistic as a manifestation of racism: “The larger national disgrace,” he said, is that “so many children still don’t have an equal shot at life because of the color of their skin.”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof anticipated Obama’s speech with his own leap from the shootings into liberal bromides. America’s greatest shame in 2015 is not the persistence of the Confederate flag in the South, Kristof wrote, but the fact that “almost two-thirds of black children grow up in low-income families.” Kristof saw this statistic as a manifestation of racism: “The larger national disgrace,” he said, is that “so many children still don’t have an equal shot at life because of the color of their skin.”
Skin
color has nothing to do with it. The overwhelming reason why children grow up
in poverty “in 2015” is that they are being raised by single parents. Children
with no father at home are between four and five times more likely to be poor
as the children of married parents, whether they are black or white. But with
72 percent of black children born to single mothers — nearly three times the
white out-of-wedlock birthrate — blacks’ higher poverty level is inevitable.
The
formula for escaping poverty as an adult also has nothing to do with race:
Graduate from high school, wait until you are married to have children, and
work full-time. Whites who eschew those bourgeois behaviors are as likely to be
poor as blacks who eschew them. Only 2 percent of individuals who follow those
rules are in poverty, according to Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution;
72 percent of those who follow them earn at least $55,000 a year. The American
poverty rate would be cut by 70 percent if the same percentage of Americans
engaged in those responsible behaviors as did in 1970, regardless of race.
America
spends over $1 trillion a year on programs for disadvantaged families,
estimates Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution. In the liberal worldview,
where compassion is measured by government spending, that vast sum should buy
the American “we” some dispensation from race-mongering. Compassionate or not,
however, that spending is unable to counteract the effects of nonmarital
childbearing, a social catastrophe about which Obama, Kristof, and other
scourges of alleged racism are silent. Family breakdown explains the other
racial inequalities that Obama seized on. He criticized “us” for “permitting”
so many children to grow up “without prospects for a job or a career.” This
lachrymose accusation again overlooks the reality that a black boy who
graduates from high school today with a modestly respectable GPA will have
scores of selective colleges beating down his door; should he finish college in
decent standing he will be able to write his ticket to the graduate school of
his choice. If few black students are able to take advantage of those racial
preferences, it is because children from single-mother homes enter school far
behind their peers in reading, math, and social-emotional skills, a gap which
schools struggle to close. Fatherless children, especially boys, are less
likely to graduate from high school or college and are more prone to crime and
gang involvement.
The
Roof massacre was also portrayed as part of a pattern of white violence against
blacks. Blacks live with the “daily threat of terror,” according to Patricia
Williams Lessane, the director of the Avery Institute for Afro-American History
and Culture at the College of Charleston. Such “terror,” Lessane wrote in the
New York Times, “does not exist within a vacuum. It looms within the growing
prison-industrial state, against the backdrop of school-reform debates, our
slow movement toward gun reform and the political maneuvers by Republicans to
make it increasingly more difficult for poor people and minorities to vote. The
reality that our civil rights are under attack is just as heavy as our fear for
our lives.” Bryan Stevenson, a black lawyer and activist, told the New York
Times that the Charleston bloodbath is just the latest example, however
extreme, of the way “black men and boys are treated by the police, by schools,
and by the state.”
In
fact, white violence against blacks is dwarfed by black on white violence. In
2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding
homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide)
against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey
provided to the author. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the
non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even
though they are less than 13 percent of the population. Both the absolute
number of incidents and the rate of black-on-white violence are therefore
magnitudes higher than white-on-black violence. There is no white race war
going on.
(The Bureau of Justice Statistics stopped publishing its table on interracial crime after 2008, perhaps not coincidentally, the first year of the Obama presidency. The agency explains its decision on the ground that some of the estimates in particular crime categories, such as sexual assault, are based on sample sizes that are too small to be statistically reliable. But that is no reason not to tabulate data on the crimes for which reliable estimates are available.)
A black boy “has a life expectancy five years shorter than a white boy,” notes Nicholas Kristof as part of his litany of persistent white racism. A considerable part of that gap is due to the black homicide-victimization rate — six times higher than the white homicide-victimization rate. It is not whites who are responsible for that homicide death gap; it’s other blacks. Blacks commit homicide at close to eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; among males between the ages of 14 and 17, the interracial homicide commission gap is nearly tenfold. Rare is the national protest and media blitz over those routine killings.
(The Bureau of Justice Statistics stopped publishing its table on interracial crime after 2008, perhaps not coincidentally, the first year of the Obama presidency. The agency explains its decision on the ground that some of the estimates in particular crime categories, such as sexual assault, are based on sample sizes that are too small to be statistically reliable. But that is no reason not to tabulate data on the crimes for which reliable estimates are available.)
A black boy “has a life expectancy five years shorter than a white boy,” notes Nicholas Kristof as part of his litany of persistent white racism. A considerable part of that gap is due to the black homicide-victimization rate — six times higher than the white homicide-victimization rate. It is not whites who are responsible for that homicide death gap; it’s other blacks. Blacks commit homicide at close to eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; among males between the ages of 14 and 17, the interracial homicide commission gap is nearly tenfold. Rare is the national protest and media blitz over those routine killings.
The
Roof massacre was a shocking throwback to this country’s deplorable racial
past. But the vast majority of whites have moved beyond that past. Most whites
and most blacks wish only to be allowed to get along, outside enforced race
consciousness. Pockets of virulent racial contempt still exist (as much among
blacks as among whites), but they are irrelevant to the millions of individual
behavioral choices that drive social and economic outcomes. It is
understandable not just to interrogate the Roof atrocity but even to overreact
to it; every mass killing over the last several years has provoked a similar
overreaction to what are equally rare events. But to exploit the very real
victimization of the Emanuel flock for an ideology of victimhood will only make
progress in closing racial economic inequality more difficult.
— Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
— Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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