BLM is defined by the left as a movement against racial discrimination, and they claim that blacks are systematically discriminated in the U.S. By systemic, we should mean both institutional (embodied in laws and policies) and psychosocial discrimination, the latter mainly stems from the perceptions of members of society about the behavior and lifestyle of a certain ethnic group, which cannot be forced to change by revolution or violence. This article focuses on issues related to institutional discrimination.
Affirmative Action Eliminates Institutional Discrimination Against Minorities
Since the Affirmative Action Movement in 1968, there has been no institutional discrimination against blacks in the U.S. Whether it is employment, higher education, or social welfare, it is basically tilted in favor of blacks. Affirmative Action, introduced by President Kennedy, is a set of laws, policies, guidelines, and administrative practices designed to end and remedy the effects of specific forms of discrimination, including government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary action private campaigns. These bills tend to focus on access to education and employment opportunities, with special consideration given to historically excluded groups, particularly minorities or women. The impetus for the adoption of Affirmative Action was to correct unfavorable provisions related to past and present discrimination in the hopes of ensuring that public institutions, such as universities, hospitals and police forces, are better able to represent the populations they serve.
It is important to note that affirmative action, which first appeared in an executive order signed by President Kennedy in 1961, was originally a negative concept, prohibiting discrimination in government hiring and enforcement on the basis of race and creed, but has evolved into a positive concept today, referring to policies that give preferential treatment to historically discriminated races in education, employment, housing matters, etc. Policies. Prior to the Obama presidency, affirmative action focused on specific quotas, but under Obama, it has quietly shifted to emphasize “targeted goals” through “good faith efforts …… to identify, select, and train potentially qualified minorities and training of potentially qualified minorities and women.” For example, many institutions of higher education have voluntarily adopted policies that seek to increase minority enrollment. Expansion campaigns, targeted recruitment, employee and development management, and employee support programs are all examples of affirmative action in employment.
The fact is: institutional racial discrimination against Blacks and Latinos not only does not exist, but instead these ethnic groups are given preferential treatment, making it easier for them to get into quality colleges or get jobs under equal conditions.
During Obama’s second presidential term, this discrimination in admissions occurred for Asians, especially Chinese, at quality universities. Resources for quality universities are limited, and Chinese and Asians have a tradition of valuing their children’s education, and in the past, admissions were based on merit, mostly to quality universities. However, in recent years, the Democratic Party’s California, New York and other states and cities with more Chinese have implemented the Asian Subdivision Act, and Harvard and Princeton have unfair rules for admitting Asians, especially Chinese, which has triggered the college affirmative action debate among Chinese Americans. The California House of Representatives even passed Proposition ACA5, which is a reverse discrimination against Asians. This state of affairs shows that the Affirmative Action in the United States has gone against the original intention – just to throw a sticking point here, which needs a dedicated article.
It is interesting to consider that, because of the rampant political correctness, only a very few prominent black Americans, such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, have dared to publicly criticize the Affirmative Action Act. His opposition was based on two grounds.
On legal grounds, Justice Thomas argued that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution prohibits the government from granting preferential treatment on the basis of race. In Adarand Constructorsv.Peña, Justice Thomas wrote, “The government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and ensure that we are all equal before the law.”
Justice Thomas believed that the Affirmative Action Act could not change the less powerful status of blacks. With the existence of the Affirmative Action Act, blacks do not need to work hard to get what other ethnic groups have worked hard for, which can make the black community very dependent on this affirmative action and lose the motivation to improve themselves, and in the end, they can only keep relying on handouts and cannot stand up on their own power.
So where is the way out for blacks? Justice Thomas argues that it is through black self-reliance rather than government policy tilt.
The Intentional Statistical Fallacy: Blacks Are the Biggest Victims of Police Enforcement Violence
The main reason for BLM street protests across the United States after Floyd was racism in police law enforcement violence, as promoted by the New York Times, CNN including the BBC in the UK and other English-speaking mainstream media, citing statistics that far more blacks die in police enforcement than any other race. Less than 10 days after the Floyd case in Minnesota, the New York Times published an article on June 3, “Minnesota Police Use 7 Times More Force Against Blacks Than Whites,” which was seen as hard evidence of deep-rooted police racism in the U.S. and was widely reprinted, and with Democratic Party dignitaries such as Nancy Polosi performing kneelings around the country, the American public was outraged and support for BLM peaked at Support for BLM peaked at 78%.
But what the leftist media, such as the New York Times, completely fail to mention is another, more important set of basic data: the varying crime rates of various races. Anyone who knows anything about statistics knows that the crime rate of each race is the denominator, and that the number of people shot by police in the course of law enforcement is only the numerator, and that the ratio of “deaths by race / crime rate by race” in the course of law enforcement is the objective analysis.
A search of crime data released by the Minneapolis Police Department from 2009-2014 shows that black suspects accounted for 74% of violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault), white suspects accounted for 7%, and Asian suspects accounted for only 1%. Blacks accounted for 69% of all violent crime arrests, whites accounted for 15% of arrests, and Asians accounted for only 2% of arrests. The racial composition of the Minneapolis population is 64% white, 18.6% black, and 5.6% Asian. It can be seen that only 18.6% of the Minneapolis population of blacks, but in the violent crime suspects and arrests up to 74% and 69%, respectively.
What is involved behind this is actually the issue of the difference in crime rates by ethnicity, and the difference in crime rates by race is a taboo topic in the West. If someone dares to talk about this issue openly in the West, he or she will be labeled as “Racist” or “Bigot-hater”, and will be attacked by public opinion, or lose their jobs, be marginalized by society, or even face threats to their personal safety. They may lose their jobs, be socially marginalized or even face threats to their personal safety. Under this soft-violent oppression of political correctness, police and law enforcement are wary of becoming targets of social attack in their enforcement of laws against blacks.
The Study the Left Ignored: The Color of Crime
So what’s the real story?In 2016, the New Century Foundation launched its 2016 report The Color of Crime, which was authored by Edwin S. Rubenstein, a All of the data for the study came from government releases, and the report revealed one thing: the vast majority of police officers are not racially discriminatory in their enforcement of the law, and used New York and Chicago as examples of how attacks on police officers are hurting the black community. Back in 2018, an author detailed the contents of this book, as detailed in “Disparities in crime rates that mask different races are gradually dismantling Western society (above and below)”.
In this article, only the relevant parts are quoted, using New York, where residents are fleeing in large numbers today, as an example. In her book, “The War on America’s Police Hurts the Black Community,” Heather Mac Donald, a prominent American journalist, lawyer and political commentator and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, notes that from 1993-2001, aggressive enforcement by New York police in black neighborhoods led to a 64 percent drop in crime, the lowest in decades at the time.
The chart below shows the number of murders in New York City, USA. The chart shows that the years when the number of murders dropped significantly (1990-2000) were also the years when the police followed through with their aggressive law enforcement policies in black neighborhoods.
Data source: New York Mag
It is important to note that the eight years of crime reduction coincided with the eight years of Giuliani’s administration (1994-2001), known as “America’s Mayor. In the face of such remarkable results, the American police were rewarded with accusations of “racism” and persecution of blacks. The mainstream media, black public figures who hype race relations, and white left politicians have formed a siege on police enforcement, and their views on the most successful policing improvements in U.S. history are contrary to those of ordinary citizens.
In 2015, the murder rate in the 50 largest U.S. cities rose 17 percent, the highest single-year increase in 20 years. In the final year of President Obama’s administration (2016), a time when “political correctness” was gaining momentum, crime rates in America’s largest cities reached a peak. In the first six months alone, 51 major cities saw a 15 percent increase in murder rates from 2015.
I hope that those who are willing to understand will read the above articles instead of dancing to the leftist media in the U.S. and parroting their words.
Anti-racism: the self-justification of the new identity politics
Since the dominant view in the West since the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 has been that moving from identity to contract is social progress, the American left has to find reasons to rationalize the new identity politics in order to justify itself. The anti-racism of critical race theory became a major banner, and the BLM movement was not so much an anti-racism as a tool for the American left to shape a new identity politics. Former President Barack Obama, who is still actively involved in American politics, has undoubtedly played a very crucial role in fueling identity politics. From 2009, when Obama was elected, The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) stopped releasing information on the race of offenders, and only in 2015 did the U.S. Department of Justice release some of the information. Instead of bridging racial tensions, his eight years as president have made identity politics and the BLM movement officially part of American politics. The new identity politics sees the political rights of people by color, ethnicity, gender, etc., as a recognition of self-identity by the group and a quest for a deeper sense of dignity.
But recognizing this identity politics to dominate American politics is, in fact, a rejection of American constitutionalism and is tantamount to recreating a completely different America. This is a very large topic that requires a separate dedicated article, and this article will only throw in a few stems.
- 20 years ago, the United States was called the “Melting Pot” and prided itself on being a country of origin, regardless of color, race, class, or gender, where one could achieve the American dream by coming to the country, identifying with American values, and working hard. The rise of identity politics in the last 20 years has turned America into a salad bowl.
- Identity politics requires special rights attached to identity, which is completely contrary to the freedom and equality of the United States based on contractual politics. The history of human evolution is the history of progress from identity to contract, while the identity politics advocated by American progressivism is from contract to identity, for example, the abandonment of meritocracy in college admissions and the use of skin color as a criterion is a kind of retrogression.
The dangers of identity politics were foreseen by Huntington long ago. In his last book, Who we are (translated as “Who are America’s Children”), the wise man foresaw that identity politics resulting from multiracial and multinational immigrant identities would eventually lead to a national identity crisis. There is no doubt that the world is now only in the United States, shouting out to make America great, American interests first to become the target of the political left, the media and social opinion attacks, such a time, if Americans still can not face the problems of their own existence, the trend of political decline is difficult to recover.
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