President Joe Biden is already starting to push people too far with his constant refrains about how racist this country is.
He is overstating a very weak case, and he risks becoming like former President Jimmy Carter when Carter’s so-called “malaise speech” had the annoying effect, in the insightful words of Vice President Walter Mondale, of “urging the people to be as good as the government.” The public and American culture are better than Biden says we are. He may soon see a backlash against him not just for hectoring us but for enlisting big government’s might to promote and enforce his racialist agenda.
Biden did it again Tuesday evening in his remarks responding to the three-count conviction of former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. He indicted the entire American judicial system, without proof, by saying that accurate and just verdicts are “much too rare” and that Chauvin’s just conviction was possible only because of a “unique and extraordinary convergence of factors.” He said that “systemic racism is a stain on our nation’s soul” while asserting, without evidence, that Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd was the result of such systemic racism. He cited the “racism and racial disparities” supposedly endemic to policing and criminal justice. And he described a Manichean “battle for the would of this nation” and “the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart.”
His message seriously exaggerates the relevant grains of truth therein. To start with, numerous careful (non-right-wing) studies actually show only the mildest of racial “disparities” in the system. Yes, more black people are arrested, but that stands to reason because black people commit more crimes on average.
Now, all decent people wholeheartedly reject the notion that criminality is somehow a racial trait. But poverty, family breakups, subpar education, and numerous other factors, many of them, of course, the lingering, evil generational effects of slavery and Jim Crow, surely play a role. The point here is not the “why.” The point is that the numbers do not lie about the “what” of criminal incidences, despite the narrative pushed by Biden and so many in the media. The statistics just do not show major racial bias in policing and convictions — although there is indeed disturbing evidence that sentencing is, on average, harsher for black convicts.
The bigger problem with the Biden/media-driven “systemic” racism narrative is not with the statistics but with the labels that misstate the nature of the problem.
Let us posit that “racism” means what, for decades, everyone agreed it means, namely the assumption that people of a certain ethnicity will possess inherent traits (such as character or intelligence) by virtue (or vice) of that ethnicity. Particularly egregious racism occurs when the stereotypes involved are negative ones. Racial “discrimination” is what happens when people (or systems) act in deliberate or obviously implicit furtherance of those racist assumptions. By these simple definitions, anybody can be racist, and anybody can act racially discriminatorily — but the obvious and horrific reality is that white racism and discrimination historically has been far more deleterious to black people in this country than vice versa.
