Читать книгу Progressive Racism - David Horowitz - Страница 5
ОглавлениеIn August 2014 the shooting of a black criminal in Ferguson Missouri by a white police officer led to a series of riots lasting several months, and eventually inspired national protests making it the civil rights cause of the Obama era. The protesters’ indictment was summarized in a chant “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” which symbolized their claim that the nation’s police had declared open season on unarmed black citizens and were killing them for the crime of being black. During the public disturbances surrounding the Ferguson events the president and his chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, exhibited active sympathy and support for the movement’s complaints.
When the facts were finally established by forensic evidence and grand jury testimony, and eventually by a separate Department of Justice investigation conducted by Holder himself, they refuted the movement’s central claim.11 Forensics, video records and the testimony of five black eyewitnesses established that the alleged victim Michael Brown, was targeted for arrest not because he was black but because he had just committed a strong-armed robbery. He did not have his hands in the air and was not shot while surrendering but while attacking the arresting officer whose gun he attempted to wrestle from its holster.
In short, the actions of the crowds that burned the city of Ferguson and looted its community businesses even before the facts were in, and which continued their rampages even after the facts were established, were not those of a civil rights protest but of a lynch mob, unconcerned with the evidence, impatient with due process, and intent on ensuring that a severely injured officer who had been the victim of a criminal attack be indicted, tried, convicted and punished. Or else. How did the mob “know” that the officer was guilty? Because he was white. Mob leaders even demanded that the prosecutor—a white liberal Democrat—be removed from the case because his own father was the victim of a black criminal 50 years previously, and therefore he could not discharge his duties fairly.22
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/26/3474838/why-civil-rights-groups-are-calling-for-the-ferguson-prosecutor-to-step-down/; http://www.cbsnews.com/news/background-of-prosecutor-in-ferguson-case-has-some-suspicious-of-bias/.
This racist thuggery would have been readily recognized as such if the lynch mob had been white. But it was composed mainly of African Americans and “civil rights” progressives, who were supported in their aggression by a media eager to embrace the baseless idea that unarmed black teens were regularly shot in the streets by white police officers who were protected by a “white supremacist” power structure. This, too, was contradicted by the facts. Shootings of black criminals by police have steadily been declining, while the number of whites shot by police officers nearly doubles that of blacks even though black males—six percent of the population—account for nearly forty percent of all violent crimes.33 Although they constitute only 13% of the population more African Americans are murdered every year than whites.44 a staggering majority—more than 90%—are murdered by other African Americans meaning that the police, rather than enemies as progressives have made them, are African Americans’ best friends and last line of defense against criminal violence.55
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf; http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf; http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43.In 2013 there were 5,537 whites who were victims of homicide, compared to 6,261 blacks. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_1_murder_victims_by_race_and_sex_2013.xls.In 2013, 90% of black homicide victims were killed by other blacks. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls.
A second contested incident occurred soon after in New York when a black street criminal named Eric Garner died while resisting arrest after police were forced to apply a choke hold because of his large size. Garner’s words—“I can’t breathe”—joined “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” as a slogan of those pushing the narrative that America—and especially its police—were irredeemably racist. “I can’t breathe” was meant to highlight the progressive mob’s view that the choke hold employed to cuff the 300 pound Garner had actually strangled him. So pervasive was the assumption of police guilt in the case that the slogan was featured on the warm-up jerseys of star athletes and became a national cause celebre. According to the activists, another unarmed black suspect had been murdered because he was black.
This time the charge of racism was particularly ludicrous since it was leveled against a police force half of whose officers were minorities.66 The sergeant on the scene in charge of the fatal arrest was an African American woman, a fact studiously ignored by the media intent on pushing the narrative of police racism. Eventually the autopsy report showed that unknown to the police who arrested him Garner was suffering from multiple maladies including heart problems, asthma and morbid obesity. It was these conditions that caused the normal trauma of a resisted arrest to result in the collapse of Garner’s pulmonary capacity and his subsequent death in the ambulance later.
http://nypost.com/2014/09/08/nypd-is-as-diverse-as-new-york-city-itself/.
In other words, both accusations—of racism and strangulation—were false. But because of the pervasive influence of progressive prejudice in the culture at large, the lynch mobs were ultimately successful. To forestall the threat of future violence stemming from future “protests,” the careers of the white officers involved in the fatal arrests were terminated. Ferguson officer Darren Wilson was forced to go into hiding to keep from being killed himself.
The furor of these events spurred much commentary as racial arsonists like Al Sharpton tried to make local tragedies into a national “crisis.” A fact lost in this shuffle was that progressive lynch mobs had been doing this work for decades. Three other recent cases show the desperate effort of progressive vigilantes to keep alive the notion of America as a racist nation. One is the destruction of the career and fortune of TV cooking personality Paula Deen, a supporter of President Obama who had given more than a million dollars in charity to help inner city African Americans. In addition to being white, Deen’s offenses were a groundless discrimination lawsuit against her brother that was later dismissed, and her use of the forbidden word “nigger” in a remark made to her husband in private after being mugged by a black criminal during a bank robbery twenty-five years earlier. (She volunteered the remark in a deposition connected to the lawsuit.77)
An even more celebrated case was the public lynching of three innocent Duke University LaCrosse players, the result of a nationwide hysteria whipped up over the rape claims of a drug-addicted black prostitute by Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and other progressives, including 88 Duke professors who signed an ad condemning the students. Before the evidence exonerated them, they had to endure termination of their school careers, a year of public condemnation by national news networks, and onerous fees for their legal defense.88 Finally, there was the rush to judgment and demand for punishment of George Zimmerman, falsely portrayed as a “white Hispanic” to make him racially culpable in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.99 As in the Ferguson case, the president and his attorney general led from behind as Sharpton and Jackson poured gasoline on the racial fire they had ignited.
Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, 2008.http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/27/opinion/la-oe-goldberg-trayvonmartin-race-20120327. It is my own opinion that Zimmerman was indeed culpable, but that doesn’t make the actions of the lynch mob any less deplorable. See Part IV, chapter 12 in this volume, “Second Thoughts About Trayvon.”
What these events show is the way America’s political culture has been tragically warped by progressives through their rejection of the color blind standard established by the Constitution and once championed by the civil rights movement and its leader Martin Luther King. Progressives have been able to persuade an influential section of the country to believe that whites are guilty before the fact and blacks are innocent even when the facts show they are guilty. The racial morality play of “white supremacy” and black “oppression” provides an indispensable myth for advancing their political agendas, which is why it has proved so durable.
The fact that racial injustice is the most problematic aspect of the nation’s heritage is also the reason that it is the focus of the progressive assault on America and its social contract. For obvious reasons, progressives largely concentrate on one race—American blacks, or “African-Americans” as they have come to be known through at least five permutations of linguistic political correctness since World War II: “coloreds,” “Negroes,” “blacks,” “persons of color” and—only then—“African-Americans.” The injustices of slavery and segregation and the historic sufferings of this community form an arguable basis for the progressive indictment, but only by systematically ignoring the historic gains—unprecedented and unparalleled—of this same community, which are the direct result of America’s tolerant and individual-centered social contract.
Progressive attacks on a chimerical “white supremacy” have been destructive for all citizens. The principal target of this racism, as already noted, is the idea of equal treatment for all individuals under the law, an idea that progressives seek to replace with group identities and group privileges based on race and gender. The idea of an equality of individuals without regard to race, ethnicity or gender, on the other hand, is the very idea that informs the American identity, and unites its diverse communities into a single nation.
There will always be racists and bigots. Only utopians will fail to understand this and seek to deploy the coercive powers of the state to make everyone believe as they do. By contrast, people connected to the realities of this world recognize that America is the most tolerant of societies. Americans’ cultural acceptance of racial, ethnic and gender minorities is virtually without parallel in human history. Interracial marriage, once the strongest racist taboo is now hardly noticed, whether among ordinary Americans or cultural celebrities; large American cities—Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta—are run by African American administrations and an African American has been twice elected to the White House. In their battles with “white supremacy,” progressives cling to a past that is already remote. They have become the true reactionaries of our time, and it is hardly surprising that they are its new racists as well.
2 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/26/3474838/why-civil-rights-groups-are-calling-for-the-ferguson-prosecutor-to-step-down/; http://www.cbsnews.com/news/background-of-prosecutor-in-ferguson-case-has-some-suspicious-of-bias/.
3 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf; http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf; http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43.
4 In 2013 there were 5,537 whites who were victims of homicide, compared to 6,261 blacks. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_1_murder_victims_by_race_and_sex_2013.xls.
5 In 2013, 90% of black homicide victims were killed by other blacks. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls.
6 http://nypost.com/2014/09/08/nypd-is-as-diverse-as-new-york-city-itself/.
8 Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, 2008.
9 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/27/opinion/la-oe-goldberg-trayvonmartin-race-20120327. It is my own opinion that Zimmerman was indeed culpable, but that doesn’t make the actions of the lynch mob any less deplorable. See Part IV, chapter 12 in this volume, “Second Thoughts About Trayvon.”
