Provocations: A word cheapened by partisan politics – The Trentonian

The word "racism" has become devalued to the point it's the verbal equivalent of the Weimar Republic mark around 1922. Or the Zimbabwe dollar around 2008.

How devalued is that? Well, in 1922 thanks to hyperinflation it took 200 billion German marks to buy a loaf of bread. In Zimbabwe in 2008, the annual rate of inflation hit 89.7 sextillion percent. One sextillion has 21 zeroes -- 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

This is not to say there's no racism and that such racism as does persist is of minor concern. It's to say that the word has been cheapened by promiscuous overuse. The word is now the tarnished coin of petty, partisan politics.

Demagogues use the word with the same reckless abandon tin-pot tyrants run their treasury printing presses, diluting the value of their currency. The word now rolls glibly off the tongue of even the bumbling inarticulate, such as Joe Biden. Google "Trump/racism" and you'll get something approaching 40 million hits. Welcome to the mob, Joe.

The word now serves as an imprecise, crude weapon, the verbal equivalent of the hand grenade. You lob it in the general direction of your foe and hope it lands close enough to take him out.

It's a sure-fire word for shutting off dialogue and shutting down discussion. It's an ad-hominem way to avoid making a case for your own point of view, by dismissing other points of view as infected with bigotry and therefore unworthy of even addressing.

The rising use of a substitute term -- "white supremacist" -- reflects the worn-down-to-the-tread overuse of the word "racist."

Something stronger was desired, and it's hoped that "white supremacist" will fill the bill. It conjures images of South Africa's brutal segregation under authoritarian apartheid. As if anything remotely like that exists in the United States today.

No one has put more mileage and wear and tear on the word "racist" than the loosely organized Black Lives Matter movement. Allegations of racism roll off its protest assembly line like widgets coming down the conveyor belts of Chinese factories.

But BLM has broadened its horizons. According to its website, BLM no longer is concerned only with slandering police departments as the updated Schutzstaffel. BLM's website proclaims that "we work to dismantle cisgender privilege" and strive to "foster a queer-affirming network." Oookay.

In this expansive BLM mission many corporations -- literally from A to Z, from Amazon to Zoom, with such as Citibank and Microsoft in between -- espy a legitimacy worthy of big-dollar financial support.

Or perhaps, alternatively, these corporations perceive a need to keep rabble-rousing "protests" at a distance.

In any event, the mainstreaming of BLM may indicate the extent to which it has been co-opted by privileged white college snots. Or so the old-time BLMers are grumbling, anyway.

I've wondered about this myself. Watching the video of brick-and-bottle throwing "protesters," I've noted a growing presence of palefaces in their midst. Lots of prosperous-looking Antifatistas shod in pricey Birkenstocks and Nikes.

It turns out I'm not alone in the observation. In the Washington Post recently, E.D. Mondaine, president of the Portland, Ore., NAACP, complained that crackers are crashing the BLM festivities. He groused that "white privilege" is "dancing on the stage that was created to raise up the voices of my oppressed brothers and sisters."

"Oppressed" is another worn-down word that's beginning to show tread from overuse, like an old tire with 150,000 miles on it. But then, the entire rationale for BLM was thread-bare from the start.

BLM's original, asserted mission was to lament the supposed racist depravity of police, to decry the supposed "state-sanctioned open hunting season" on African Americans, all while ignoring the epidemic of black-on-black violence.

BLM came into existence protesting a fiction, chanting "Hands up, don't shoot!" -- a reference to an event that actually never happened, according to the findings of the Obama Justice Department.

As I keep saying in this space -- and it's surely a point that merits belaboring -- the plain fact is that lethal confrontations between blacks and police are statistically rare, and thankfully so.

Of about 10 million arrests a year, there are only about 1,000 lethal incidents involving blacks and whites, and more involving the latter than the former (Statista Research).

So lethal incidents constitute one ten-thousandths of a percent -- roughly 0.0001 -- of all arrests made. The 904 fatal shootings by police in 2019, including 370 whites and 235 blacks, is on the order of 0.00009 (nine hundred-thousands of a percent) of total arrests.

While blacks die in confrontations with police at a significantly greater rate than whites, such deaths are in any event rare -- 30 per million population for blacks, 28 per million for Latinos, 12 per million for whites and four per million for Asian and other minorities.

And despite the higher rate of deaths for blacks in encounters with police, violent/serious crime in black neighborhoods may be a more significant factor than race.

An astute reader -- who is sometimes in sharp disagreement with this column -- points out revealing data on the subject, from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (2018).

The UCR numbers tell of 1,243,283 white arrests for violent/serious crimes and 699,265 black arrests. The black share of the total -- 36 percent -- is, yes, disproportionate to African Americans' 13 percent of the population. But the 36 percent share of black arrests for violent/serious crime is in line with the 34 percent share of blacks killed in lethal confrontations with law enforcement.

The numbers arguably indicate, in other words, that levels of criminal activity in an area -- and not necessarily race per se -- account for the higher rate of black fatalities.

In fact a study by Joseph Cesario of Michigan State University and David Johnson of the University of Maryland, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, came to just such a conclusion. (That study is now being subjected not only to the customary scholarly debate but also to heavy politicized attack.)

Meanwhile, disruptive, obstructive and sometimes violent "protests" continue to roil the Democratic Party's one-party urban bantustans -- from Portland to Seattle to Minneapolis to Chicago to New York.

Bullhorned demands and mob chants call for the "defunding," and even the abolition of police forces. Such ruckuses draw attention away from real problems afflicting black communities -- and away from real solutions.

Blacks are indeed falling victim to gunplay -- but not nearly so much at the hands of police as at the hands of punk gangsters in their own neighborhoods. The punk gangsters, long glorified by a flourishing hip-hop industry, hold entire city blocks under their swaggering, strutting sway. And they play a key role in narcotics trafficking, poisoning the communities in which they operate.

The urban bantustan mayors and the governors politically aligned with them are content to issue bleating pleas for more "gun control."

As if there aren't already literally hundreds of laws on the books to curb criminal use of firearms. And as if the gangsters in any event would be any more inclined to heed additional gun laws than they are the existing ones.

The disturbing truth is that it's easier -- and far safer -- for the bantustan mayors and allied governors to deplore the gangbangers' hardware than to direct moral leadership and aggressive law enforcement at the gangbangers themselves.

And trashing police while making scattershot allegations of racism -- "systemic racism," "institutional racism," "cultural racism," "endemic racism," "ubiquitous racism" and on and on -- are much easier than addressing the real and complex issues that have long kept cities on the edge of fiscal disaster and their African American communities at significant disadvantage.

These issues include the familiar vicious cycle of crime, crippled city economies, social dysfunction and faltering school systems.

But near or at the very top of the list is an issue that's risky even to broach, never mind address. This is the touchy, touchy but seminal issue of single-parent households.

Let it be stipulated that there are many single parents -- mostly moms -- who do a heroic job raising their children under trying circumstances. That being said, the dreary reality remains, as study after study, right and left, has shown, children in single-parent households are at a marked disadvantage by every social, educational and economic measure.

Yet BLM openly and aggressively asserts an agenda of undermining two-parent families, and never mind that these are the families in which children are most likely to thrive. "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure," declares a defiantly obtuse BLM.

The massive disproportion of black households headed by a single parent may indeed be traced, as many say, to historic discrimination, to, yes, racism. Yet merely acknowledging the fact doesn't change the fact.

To a problematical extent, single-parent households across the board, white, black and Latino, have become the accepted social norm. (It's surely no coincidence that Asian American households have the lowest percentage of single-parent families and the highest educational achievement and top average income of all groups.)

This is a long-simmering issue. In 1965, the Harvard scholar Pat Moynihan, later a Democratic senator, voiced alarm that births to unmarried black mothers were undercutting black advancement.

When Moynihan voiced that concern, 25 percent of black births were to unwed mothers. By 2015, the figure had reached 70 percent.

Chanting slogans and waving placards in the streets while hurling charges suggesting pandemic, out-of-control racism -- despite amazing strides of progress in the last 50 years -- does more than just divert attention away from real solutions to real problems.

Politicized racial demagoguery spreads a self-defeating, cynical hopelessness, as if to say -- contrary to the early days of the Civil Rights Movement -- don't bother to keep the faith. Give up. Never mind staying the course and fighting the good fight.

The message is instead to throw a brick at a cop, topple a statue of Christopher Columbus, shatter a store window, loot a liquor store, occupy and trash a whole section of downtown -- in short, further hobble a city's already limping economy and put its African American citizens at even worse disadvantage.

Okay then. But just don't call such activities "protesting." And don't try to tell us it's all about progress for minorities. Don't profane the honorable term "civil rights" by coopting it as your cheap political slogan.

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Provocations: A word cheapened by partisan politics - The Trentonian