Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
Recently, we’ve had a lot of discussion about racial relations, and the consensus from left to right seems constant and uniform that they’re getting much worse.
There were two or three iconic events this last week that emphasized that pessimism. One was the Juneteenth celebration in Chicago, which commemorated the official end of slavery in the 1860s and is now our newest national holiday.
It ended up with 39 people wounded, seven dead, semiautomatic gunfire. It was almost like a war zone. The mayor of Chicago, Mayor [Brandon] Johnson, did not comment on what was the cause of this or the pathologies that would lead people to slaughter. This was entirely 100% Black-on-Black crime, but he was talking about illiberality and discrimination against trans people when his city is under siege.
At the same time, or prior to that, was the Karmelo Anthony murder, where Karmelo Anthony, a young Black teenager at a track meet, ventured over to the opposing side by intent, carrying a knife in his backpack, went into a tent where the entire group there was from the opposite team that he was playing, and then said he would not leave when asked 10, 12 times, and finally said, “Somebody,” he said, “push me out or try it and you’ll find out.”
And a young man by the name of [Austin] Metcalf slightly touched him, and he stabbed him in the heart, killed him, ran away, and the result was the Black community has championed Karmelo Anthony. Not all of the Black community, but a sizable portion, and it’s gotten to the point where they believe that he was justified because the so-called white community doesn’t understand Black pride, and you don’t interfere with the space, et cetera.
In other words, ignoring all the details that he deliberately ventured over to cause a confrontation which could have been settled peacefully if he just left. But the reaction was what was disturbing.
And then in addition to that, there was the Caitlin Clark incident. She is, remember, the superstar of the Women’s National Basketball Association, and she came out of a fantastic college career.
She’s very tall, kind of thin, not frail, but not muscular, but she’s a wonderful outside shooter. And somebody with that height and the ability, who’s quick, and the ability to pass has revolutionized the Women’s Basketball Association. And the result is she is gaining, not just for herself and her team, but for the entire league, enormous increases in revenue.
Some people believe that she’s responsible for 25% in increased revenues. So all the players are getting raises. They have increased stature. They have bigger audiences. They have bigger ad opportunities. They fly not passenger class commercial anymore. It’s been a win-win.
And yet systematically Black players, women have been trying to hurt her.
And the most recent incident was that we had a Black player from the opposite team knock her down, and then when she tried to get up, another player may have tried to stop her, but one player took her fist and hit her in the neck or pressed her in the neck, and there were also a knee involved, and it was pretty clear that there was a deliberate attempt.
And this is one of, according to a lot of news accounts, 10 or 12 incidents where there has been flagrant fouls issued because the players are trying to hurt her.
So what was the commentary? The commentary was, well, the teams in the WNBA are mostly Black. They’re mostly, to be candid, lesbian, and Caitlin Clark is white and straight, and therefore, this supposedly racist audience has flocked to the WNBA to cheer her on in a divisive standard.
There’s no evidence that that is true, but the reaction from the Black women and the majority of them, probably not so, but from a sizable minority of them, is to hurt her and damage her even though they know that that is not in their interest.
I’m gonna talk about that a little bit later, but when you add up all of these incidents, you get the impression that something has gone wrong.
And usually, the standard exegesis is given the traditions of slavery that have been gone for 160-plus years, Jim Crow in the South, and then this new term systematic racism, white privilege, etc., etc., then there’s a justified rage.
But that rage and what I just outlined were way in the distant past.
We’re talking about the present and how the Black community can flourish like every other community, given it has shocking crime statistics, shocking divorce statistics, shocking illegitimacy, single-family parenthood, etc.
And how did we get here? How did we get to this mess?
I think we were making pretty good progress in the ’80s and ’90s with a whole new generation of Black politicians, Black athletes, Black actors, Black everybody.
And there was a growing sense that race was incidental, not essential to who we are. It was essential in a multiracial society. After all, we don’t want to end up like India or Indonesia or Brazil, where we’re racially obsessed, or we have caste, or we have classes. It doesn’t work in a democratic society.
But Barack Obama came in and said he was going to heal all of us in 2009. He did just the opposite.
Almost immediately with the Louis Henry Gates incident, the beer summit, he emphasized race. He said things that were not true, that the police systematically are more likely to shoot young Black men who are unarmed versus white men, given the incidence of who is arrested.
Statistics do not bear that out.
Pretty soon, affirmative action, which was a black/white solution of some 60 years to past discrimination, morphed into diversity, equity, inclusion.
And under Obama, he had this vision that anybody who was not white… Of course, he was half white, but he never identified as white.
He always identified sort of like the one-drop rule of the old Confederacy. If you had one drop of non-white blood, then you were non-white.
But he identified as non-white, but he said that 30% of the country, that was the basis of DEI, these would be immigrants from India, immigrants from Mexico, people from China, Japan, had a sort of updated Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition, and they had legitimate grievances for past sins against the 70 or 65% white population.
So in all of these cases, the universities and the political system and the bureaucracies institutionalized that anger and that binary.
It comes out of Marxist ideology that there is no middle, no middle class. There are oppressed, oppressors, victimized, victimizers.
But this was new because they substituted race for class.
This is not sustainable because we are now in the seventh decade of the civil rights movement.
We’ve had about $25 trillion invested in Great Society programs. We’ve had set-asides. We’ve had affirmative action. We’ve had theme houses, separate graduations, separate dorms, separate safe spaces.
We’ve had a whole litany, and what’s happening now is there is an identifiable weariness, fatigue with all of this.
It’s not just from so-called white people. It’s not from racists. It’s from the Black middle class, and you can see the Black middle class is getting very angry because they are more prone to encounter Black youth, and they are the victims disproportionately of Black crime compared to other minority groups.
And there’s conservatives in the Black community who are now looking at what Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury have warned us for years, and that is during the worst moments of segregation, the Black community had created paradigms of success, nuclear families, fathers present in the household, strict discipline for the children, like all other communities.
And that was sort of wiped out or at least crippled during the Great Society where the government replaced the parents.
So where are we now?
If Black politicians of the left continue to not look at what’s causing these shootouts or this racism from Black people, then they’re only gonna further alienate the majority of Black people who want truth and they want change within the Black community. But more importantly, they’re gonna alienate 70% of the population who does not agree with them.
Hispanics, Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, white Americans do not believe that society forces Black people to shoot each other or to commit crimes at higher rates than other communities.
That solution has to come from the Black community, and it’s not any longer a result of historic transgressions or injustice more than a century and a half ago.
That’s not the answer. The answer is here and now, and it’s a self-help, self-discipline within the Black community, and calls for such reform are coming from the Black community.
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