A race lost

On 7 July, five racial murders involving white policemen were committed in Dallas. The policemen weren’t the murderers. They were the victims.

The murderer was Xavier Johnson, a black veteran who saw killing white people, especially cops, as his mission. What ostensibly made him open fire was the killing of two young blacks by white policemen. That galvanised Johnson into action, but he was ready for it.

The killer’s ideological blanks were filled in by a party whose fan, possibly member, he was. Called The New Black Panthers, the party preaches hatred of whites. It also makes a valuable contribution to history, having discovered that Jews were responsible for the slave trade and 9/11 was a Zionist conspiracy.

New Black Panthers is only one such organisation. There’s also The Nation of Islam, while The Afro-American Defence League’s mission statement has the simplicity of genius: “Attack everything in blue except the mailman.” Chelsea FC would be well-advised to change their strip, especially when touring the US.

Thus primed, armed with a high-power rifle and trained by the US Army in infantry tactics, Johnson was ready to highlight yet again the problem of race relations everywhere.

Riots terrorising the country are reminding Americans of the severity of the problem, while creating troubled waters in which assorted demagogues can then fish. Especially coming to the fore is the activist network Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Its presupposition is that racist policemen go out on the prowl looking for blacks to kill. For BLM it goes without saying that every black killed by a cop is an innocent victim of racism, hunted in a never-ending open season on specifically blacks.

Though facts shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with heart-felt convictions, they’re worth mentioning anyway. The principal datum touted by BLM is that, while blacks make up only 13 per cent of the population, they account for 26 per cent of police shootings.

However, blacks are charged with 62 per cent of robberies, 57 per cent of murders and 45 per cent of assaults. In New York City, blacks are responsible for 75 per cent of all shootings, 70 per cent of all robberies and 66 per cent of all violent crime. Since they dominate the group likely to offer armed resistance to police, the 26 per cent figure falls below the statistical expectation.

While police are responsible for 12 per cent of white and Hispanic homicides, the corresponding figure for black homicides is only four per cent. Also, 40 per cent of cop killers are black, and a policeman is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than an unarmed black man to be killed by a policeman.

BLM’s case therefore doesn’t stand up to facts, but this doesn’t mean no case exists. For the problem of black alienation in America is real, as witnessed by the blacks’ disproportionate representation in crime statistics and on welfare rolls.

As Richard Weaver put it, ideas have consequences. So do actions, and in America it’s the ideas and actions of the whites that are largely responsible for the problems with the blacks.

Ideologues like BLM trace their animus back to slavery, and for once they have a point. Trade in people is moral and social poison. Even when discontinued, it leaves a toxic residue in the soil.

The English knew this, hence the 1772 ruling by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield: “The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political…” Even earlier, in 1569, the judge presiding over the Cartwright case declared that “England [is] too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in.”

American slaves were emancipated in 1862, a year later than even the abolition of serfdom in Russia, a country not priding herself on being a paragon of liberty. But the poison in the soil never quite disappeared.

Back in the 1970s, my black friends in Texas were telling me that, as children, they had had to ride in the back of the bus. Indeed, segregational Jim Crow laws survived until 1965 in the South, leaving a lasting memory of resentment.

Doing the damage is always easier than undoing it. White liberals jumped on the wagon on desegregation and drove it into the buffers of reverse discrimination and the culture of entitlement. Leftwing trendies like Leonard Bernstein would throw parties for the original Black Panthers and applaud the likes of Huey Newton spouting Black Power hatred.

Blacks were told, if not in so many words, that black racism was acceptable: it was payback time. Blacks were entitled to preferential treatment. Coyly called ‘affirmative action’, the only thing it affirmed was growing alienation.

Rather than blacks simply being offered equal opportunities to pursue productive lives, their resentment was encouraged to fester in hellhole inner-city ghettos, financed by welfare handouts.

The wounds inflicted by slavery weren’t healed; they became gangrenous. The air of the US is no longer breathed in by slaves, but white liberals have exhaled the poisonous atmosphere of marginalisation.

The law of unintended consequences has never been repealed, and evil begets evil. It then takes more than bien pensant hot air to make the atmosphere clean again.