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March 7, 2023

The rhetoric and uproar over the beating death of Trye Nichols by five Black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, demonstrates how badly the “conversation” over race has deteriorated.  One would think that a crime involving Blacks killing another Black would lack a racial angle to exploit.  Alas, in today’s race-obsessed universe that is never the case.  Unable to help themselves, our nation’s top racialists, beginning with President Joe Biden, weighed in on the controversy hurling the standard epithets of “systemic racism” and “White supremacy.”  The media, and others, were happy to join in.  

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With the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ending “separate but equal,” the Civil Rights legislation of the sixties, affirmative action, and “Great Society,” with its trillions of dollars of wealth transfers to Blacks, one might have considered that, nearly sixty years later, the nation would mend and race relations improve.

Indeed, the emergence of Barack Obama and his ascension to the Presidency in 2008 suggested that that moment had arrived. The event should have been an inflection point in America’s racial history.  Many thought it was.  How else to explain a White majority nation electing a Black President, other than that America had turned the corner?  Alas, Obama was not one to placate the nation.  Rather than use the opportunity of his rise to the White House as the crowning achievement of a long treacherous journey to racial reconciliation, he chose instead to agitate and polarize the nation further.  His presidency should have represented the fulfillment of the great dream of Lincoln, King, and of our Declaration of Independence, but became instead the basis of an ever-widening racial gap that may never be bridged.

Of his many racial stunts, perhaps the worst moment occurred during the Trayvon Martin affair.  After the shooting death of the young Black, Obama famously stated that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”  The statement was provocative.  Rather than pacify the nation, he inflamed it.  He seemed to dismiss his White mother and the White grandparents who raised him.  He, thus, injected his own biases into the controversy.  As in so many other instances, rather than seek a peaceful resolution, he roiled the nation further.  

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The Trayvon Martin episode (like so many others) had, indeed, unleashed the furies emanating from the dark underside of racial politics and grievance in America; and it was not a pretty sight.  It revolved around a simple narrative that had become the essence of a vast and elaborate racial industry that had grown and metastasized through the decades.

The narrative was as plain as it was destructive: it was that America was racist to the core, institutionally and categorically, and no matter what progress the nation made, no matter the multitude of unparalleled triumphs Blacks enjoyed, the stain and moral culpability would never be erased.  

It did not matter that Blacks occupied the highest echelons of American wealth, power, and influence in the country, even the Presidency, the attorney general’s office, the halls of Congress, governors’ mansions, city halls, in the media, the academy, Hollywood, the music and entertainment world, sports, business, fashion, medicine, and law.  

Nor did it matter that a vast complex of diversity programs, appointments, set asides, quotas, contracts, gerrymandered districts, anti-discrimination laws, voting rights, and wealth transfers have been instituted on behalf of Blacks, or that extensive bureaucracies and organizations have been brought into existence to protect and cater to the needs of Blacks.   

Nor did it matter that Blacks, Black achievement, and Black culture were embraced, that Blacks received extensive preferential treatment and subsidies, or that a substantial political/media broadside was triggered for virtually any perceived racial slight or slur to defend Black sensitivities.  

Nor did it matter that the United States was bar none the single greatest place in the world for a young Black to live and grow.