Our nation has been embroiled in an insipid “conversation” on race in America
for several months now. It started with
the tragic killing of Travon Martin by George Zimmerman. Liberal “news” organizations like CNN and
MSNBC declared this a “race” case within hours of the shooting even though
there was not a single scintilla of evidence (ever) that race had played any
role in the event itself. The “news” media
repeatedly made an issue of Florida’s “stand your ground laws,” and continually
evoked “racial profiling” while in the courtroom the “stand your ground” was
irrelevant and even the prosecution never once brought up race as a motivating
factor. In short, the innocent verdict
could not have surprised anyone with even the most cursitory reading of the
case. Yet CNN and MSNBC ran hours of
biased, irrelevant and pernicious coverage of the case and insisted that
American needed to have a “conversation” on race.
On the very real issue of race in America you tend to get a fairly one
sided view from both the left and the right.
I think the folks from my liberal leaning generation still like to see
themselves on the front lines of a battle that is largely past. The kind of systemic racism that was fought in
the 1950’s and 1960’s by the civil rights movement is principally over. When a discussion of “race” in America
centers around one of the most powerful women in the world being denied the
opportunity to look at a $39K handbag (?!?) in a store then I think we are in a
very different place then we were in 1964 (especially when the store was not
even in America!). The right, as I have
discussed before, sees us (ludicrously) in some weird “post-racial” world. Yet we
have a powerful liberal and a civil rights establishment with a strong and
simple agenda that gets them in a spotlight that they are loath to relinquish.
But since they are in the spotlight what should they be saying? Many thousands of hours were spent on George
Zimmerman, does the rate of murder among the African-American community rate
the same amount of “conversation?” Does
there not need to be a “conversation” among the civil rights leadership about pervasive
rap music that routinely glorifies brutal violence and misogyny? Almost 70% of black children are born to
single mothers, does the prevalence of broken and single family homes and absence
fathers in the African American community deserve “conversation?”
What is “moral leadership” anyway, isn’t it saying the hard things, the
things no one wants to hear, after all it is easy to blame everything on some
outside force like the government and a lot harder (for all of us) to look
inward. In 1961 Martin Luther King said
in a sermon: "Do you know that
Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for
58% of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we've got to do something about
our moral standards," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a
congregation in 1961. "We know that there are many things wrong in the
white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't
keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves." Four years later Daniel Patrick Moynihan
published his prescient and groundbreaking Department of Labor report; “The
Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
Moynihan’s report sparked a resounding cry of outrage that echoed
throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to the warning
that the “ghetto” family was in disarray.
The fact that the above quote from Dr. King and Mr. Moynihan’s 1965
report seems so relevant today is tragic.
It means that decades of well meaning government programs have simply
not moved the ball forward in the way they should have.
Are there race issues on America? Absolutely,
for one thing American public education needs to be strengthened for all people;
a strong public education is literally the backbone of our democracy. But the fact is that a lot of what ails the
African American community cannot be solved by Government fiat no matter how
hard one might wish it to be. As Dr.
King implied back in 1961 we need a parallel track of civic action by all Americans
for all Americans as well as private soul-searching within the black community.
