Posted on November 6, 2021 by Paul Mirengoff
The “racial reckoning’s” reckoning
The Washington Post has a lengthy article about how Tuesday’s election has dashed the hopes of black activists. The article begins this way:
The summer of 2020 brought a renewed focus on addressing racism, with protesters filling the streets after the police killings of Black men; statues of Confederate leaders coming down from their prominent perches; and the leading Democratic presidential candidate promising systemic changes to right the wrongs of the past on his way to winning the White House.
But Tuesday’s election results underscored how much the political winds have shifted since the start of what many activists had hoped was a new national awakening to the stubborn legacy of America’s racist history.
Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in Virginia, in part, by warning about anti-racism curriculums in schools that examine the ways policies and laws perpetuate systemic discrimination [Note: a misleading statement of the curriculums in question.]
A proposal to overhaul policing was defeated in Minneapolis — the liberal city that gave rise to the summer of protests after a police officer murdered George Floyd — as voters rejected the idea of replacing a traditional law enforcement presence with one that would take a “comprehensive public health approach” to public safety.
Are black activists surprised by these election results? If their critique of America as systemically and unrelentingly racist has any truth to it, the surprising thing isn’t that the activists’ agenda was rejected in Virginia and Minneapolis, it’s that “defund the police” and the teaching of dumbed-down Critical Race Theory took hold in the first place.
Actually, these two developments — defund the police and teaching CRT — are surprising under any view of America other than that it went insane. No sane society would entertain the possibility of abolishing or cutting way back on its police force and switching to “a comprehensive public health approach to public safety.” No sane nation would teach children that race is a central fact about them and their classmates or that an evil like racism is the central fact about its history.
more
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/the-racial-reckonings-reckoning.php
