When a politician says he wants to “talk,” generally it’s that he wants you to listen. Enter presidential contender Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who recently said that he’s seeking a dialogue about race.
“Americans have created a toxic environment where persistent racism is allowed to fester, Sen. Cory Booker told a crowd in Iowa over the weekend, and the solution is to start having more productive and honest conversations on racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice,” wrote the Grio, February 11.
“This won’t be easy, Booker warned. He said Americans will have to push through the natural tendency to feel defensive or even angry,” the site continued.
Speaking in Marshalltown on February 9, “Booker, 49, a former Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey, frequently discussed incarceration and employment disparities, while also telling his parents’ story of trying to buy a house in an un-integrated New Jersey suburb in the late 1960s with the help of a volunteer civil rights lawyer,” Reuters adds.
Sounding very paternalistic, Booker also said that Americans tend to fear “talking to people about what they don’t understand.” He “said he’d had white friends come up to him recently and say ‘I don’t understand this blackface thing, can you explain it to me?’ ― referring to the controversy with Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) and a racist yearbook photo that resurfaced less than two weeks ago,” the Huffington Post informed.
For the record, this seems fanciful and fictional. I doubt that white “friends” (plural) actually asked the senator that question. But, anyway, the Post continued, “‘Imagine, in this climate now, saying that publicly,’ Booker said. ‘If you want to have more courageous empathy, put yourself in a white person’s position who might have questions.’”
This sounds good, but note that the senator was trying to appeal to Iowa voters, who are 91 percent white. Moreover, consider Booker’s conception of the “problem.” He later told the crowd, relates the Post:
We’ve created this toxic environment in America where we have persistent racism, persistent bigotry, pain and hurt in entire communities. City of Newark, the reason why we have concentrated poverty there is because folk like being poor? No, it’s because it was systematically discriminated against. It was redlined, disinvested, FHA polices. Even great policies like the GI bill, African Americans had a very hard time taking advantage of many of the pathways to the middle class.
Of course, this is the standard leftist line, and it brings to mind a point radio host Rush Limbaugh made in 2015 when responding to a silly allegation that he criticized Michelle Obama for “being black.” Mentioning ex-Attorney General Eric Holder’s 2009 comment that Americans are cowardly when discussing race, he said on his program, “The problem with the conversation on race, whenever you engage in it, is that liberals don’t listen to what you say.”
“You’d better say the right thing or Eric Holder and his representatives are gonna come along and try to destroy you,” Limbaugh also stated. “They will love to have conversations about race, but only in ways they permit.”
True. Just as “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery” in Orwell’s 1984 dystopia, here “dialogue” is monologue. Leftists don’t want an Honest Discussion™ about race. They want to preach and dictate and hear you repeat their words back to them, as you sit at the master’s feet being enlightened by his brilliance from on high. (Although in Booker’s case, he mainly wants power).
In reality, here’s what an “honest discussion” about race would relate:
• Booker’s attributing of the plight of blacks to past discrimination is nonsense. As Dr. Walter E. Williams pointed out in 2017, from 1890 to 1954 — an age of far greater discrimination — the black unemployment rate ranged from the same as to lower than that of whites. Moreover, only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers in 1938; today the figure is 73 percent. This is relevant to income disparities because only “8 percent of black married-couple families live in poverty,” Williams tells us.
• Blacks’ higher incarceration rate isn’t due to discrimination, but corresponds to their higher crime rate. While only 13 percent of the population, blacks commit approximately 50 percent of all homicides and 38.5 percent of violent crime generally. In New York City, in fact, 96 percent of all crime and 98 percent of gun crime are committed by blacks and Hispanics.
• There is no “epidemic” of police shooting blacks. The facts: Shootings of black suspects have declined 75 percent during the last decades, and more whites than blacks are shot by cops every year. Moreover, police are even more likely to shoot white than black suspects, relative to the races’ different homicide rates and the rates at which they feloniously shoot cops. Studies have also shown that police are more willing to shoot white than black suspects and that blacks are more likely to shoot police than be shot by them.
• If white “racism” is the cause of inter-racial income disparities, why do Hindus (from India) and Nigerian immigrants earn more than American-born whites?
• As evidenced by incessant talk of “white privilege,” affirmative action and quotas disadvantaging whites, college “safe spaces” and other places excluding them, and the continual impugning of “old white men,” today’s fashionable racial prejudice isn’t anti-black, but anti-white.
Yet dare utter these truths and the arbiters of “honest discussion” will hurl names and try to destroy you. Of course, punishing honesty gets you dishonesty.
The reality, though, is that today we have Racism on the Brain; this blinds us to our biggest problems. Related to this is what philosopher C.S. Lewis expressed in The Screwtape Letters, a book written from the point of view of demons trying to undermine a man. One technique was to persuade people to exaggerate their faults — just convince the pacifist he’s too militaristic and the militarist that he’s too pacifistic, is the example Lewis used.
What is evident today? Analyzing some deadly sins, we see sloth facilitated via handouts; envy stoked through class warfare; pride labeled “self-esteem” and encouraged, greed in leftists masquerading as redistributionist charity; and, most prominently, lust everywhere, with perverse sexuality infusing media, entertainment, and academia and “genders” metastasizing like the national debt. Yet we’re supposed to believe that “racism” should consume all our attention.
But that is what’s happening, like it or not. A case in point is how not just Booker, but all the Democrat presidential contenders are all in on identity politics, as Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson discussed Tuesday night (video below).
As Carlson points out, even old socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — a guy white enough for two people and representing the union’s whitest state — who focused on class but not race during his 2016 run, is now playing the race card. Is all this really honest?
No, but honest discussion doesn’t get demagogues into the White House.
Photo of Sen. Cory Booker: AP Images
