07/01/2015
In my piece last night, I noted that virtually no conservatives have criticized Barack Obama’s shamefully politicized eulogy of the victims of the Charleston Church shooting. I am happy the report that Heather Mac Donald has broken the mold with an excellent piece in National Review, which noted many of the same themes of his speech as I did.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. [The Shameful Liberal Exploitation of the Charleston Massacre, July 1, 2015]Significantly, MacDonald countered the lie that there is an epidemic of white on black violence:
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.I do have one bone to pick with Mac Donald’s otherwise excellent piece, she celebrates the conservative surrender on the Confederate flag.
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.As most all Americans were fine with the Confederate Flag in public places until 20 years ago, and virtually no one batted an eye about the compromise until after the shooting, if the Confederate flag is truly a symbol of white supremacy, then Obama’s bromides about how indifferent America is to institutionalized racism would be true. If it is not a symbol of white supremacy, then why ban it just because one homicidal maniac embraced it as such?
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.