Guest Notes

Political notes

11 July 2020

9:00 AM

11 July 2020

9:00 AM

We must resist the American Left’s dangerous race-based lies

I have been following the rise of identity politics for 30 years now, starting especially in the nine years I spent in the United States in the 1990s, and have come to regard it as one of the most toxic and dangerous developments in the world today. It has been built from the ground up by an academic/activist/media class that is morally and intellectually corrupt to the core, and more corrupt the ‘higher’ you go. The Ivy League are more dishonest than any state university, and the New York Times and CNN are spreaders of narrative poison in a way that smaller outlets aren’t yet (although most of them are now scrambling to catch up, or simply falling into line under the pressure/thuggery that ‘higher’ media institutions bring to bear).

The US black community’s problems are very real, but, with due respect to Black Lives Matter, they have almost nothing to do with racist policing and almost everything to do with the collapse of the black family and the spread of lawlessness and chaos in the black inner-cities, along with the undermining of almost any serious attempt to provide a disciplined educational environment for young black kids in those inner-city areas. The black illegitimacy rate (whereby so many black children born today can expect no stable family or father in their lives) has gone from an already dangerous 24.1 per cent in 1965 to 77 per cent today.

To pretend that racist policing, which is almost entirely a myth, or some nebulous ‘structural racism’ is the cause of black poverty and dysfunction, while completely ruling out any serious discussion of black family, cultural and educational issues (a blackout ruthlessly enforced across academia, media, politics and social media) is a disgrace. Those who buy into this are betraying black people, not helping them, and in an abjectly cowardly way.

In Minneapolis, where the BLM protests, later riots, began, the mayor is a hard-left activist; the entire city council is Democrat, except for one Green party councillor; the state has a hard-left Democrat governor; the Democrat state attorney general is an open supporter of Antifa and a former defender both of notable racist Louis Farrakhan and of gangland cop-killers; and both congressional senators are Democrats. A black man heads the Minneapolis city police.

Minneapolis has been governed by the Democrats for nearly fifty years now (the last Republican mayor was in 1973, for one day!). Almost all large American cities have been under Democrat control for even longer and are in even worse shape for their black residents. Yet the mainstream media would have you believe that all black community problems are somehow the fault of Donald Trump, or white supremacists, or some other equally fictitious bogeyman.

Genuine white supremacists in the US barely exist and there is no serious support for them from Republican politicians, in stark contrast to the open support that Antifa – a genuine terrorist organisation – receives from the Democrats political/media/academic complex.

In the George Floyd case, what was unforgivable was that the subsequent complete breakdown of law and order was fomented despite his death having been immediately condemned across the political spectrum, vocally and forcefully. From Trump down there was complete unity that the police action seemed indefensible (although proper investigation should always be conducted, as for example the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin frauds, which sparked the previous US rounds of inter-racial chaos and destruction, proved). All agreed on the need for justice, until the media and the political Left poured their ideological poison of identity politics into the equation, protests were turned into riots, and the actions of a single bad cop (or perhaps four, including one black and one Hmong) were dishonestly portrayed as being synonymous with the behaviour of all cops across America. There are no words adequate to describe these racial arsonists and their efforts to destroy everything in pursuit of short-term political advantage.

As for the alleged ubiquity of police racism and its impact on the black community, this is an almost complete lie. In a country of 330 million, there will always be some terrible mistakes and even acts of genuine evil, but such instances are very rare and utterly non-representative, as the research of Heather MacDonald or Peter Kirsanov, based on FBI statistics, demonstrates.

Poor black inner-city communities in fact suffer much more from under-policing than over-policing. In the aftermath of the Michael Brown riots in Ferguson and the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore during Barack Obama’s presidency, the police consciously withdrew their presence and enforcement activities under the denunciation they (wrongly) received from Obama and the media. The consequence? A significant spike in murder rates and gang violence in both places.

But nobody in the media/academic/activist/left-political class actually gives a damn about those many, many extra black deaths they have directly caused, just as they don’t care about the epidemic of black-on-black inner- city gang murder that kills many thousands of black people (especially young ones) every year. Those deaths don’t matter, apparently, because they cannot be exploited for moral thrills and raw political power, nor used to gain political leverage by inducing guilt in ordinary people who have done nothing wrong, by claiming that they represent a ‘legacy of slavery’ or ‘systemic racism’ or some other pseudo-intellectual drivel.

And now, tragically, we see imitative efforts being made in Australia today to inject this same toxic identity politics poison into our education system and society, and especially our young people. These efforts need to be resisted – such ideas, and the associated relentless, cynical fomenting of racial tension for political advantage, truly hold the potential for civilizational collapse.

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Dr Richard Stone studied and taught in the US in the 1990s and now works in Sydney. These are his personal views.


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