Reasoning Needed in Race Discussion

In its Sunday edition, the Providence Journal continued its destructive and divisive vanity project stoking racial unrest.  This time, the subject is the different proportion of “people of color” in law enforcement and the courts as opposed to the population.  Once again, the ostensible act of journalism doesn’t deign to present anything that might be considered an opposing — or even skeptical — voice.  This is activism, pure and simple, and reporter Katie Mulvaney offers a helpfully concise example of the utter lack of reasoning that the activism requires:

While the makeup of the state’s population continues to change, the complexion of its power structure, including those who enforce, dictate and argue the laws, remains largely the same. It is predominantly white, even as children of color now make up nearly 40 percent of the state’s youth population.

If the absurdity of those two sentences doesn’t hit you in the eye like social-justice-warrior spittle, think about it for a moment.  The “makeup of the state’s population” is changing — meaning that people with darker skin tend to be recent arrivals or very young.  The racial proportions of people in higher positions within law enforcement and the courts is not comparable to “the state’s youth population.”  To match the population at large with a pool of older people within a limited range of personal accomplishment in a specific professional field, the hiring process would have to be so skewed as to constitute overt racism.  That’s what the activists want.

Also consider the age of folks who would be entering that range of their careers.  When they were young adults, choosing a course in life a quarter-century ago, two of the iconic songs in rap/hip-hop were N.W.A.’s “F*** Tha Police” and Body Count’s “Cop Killer.”  Those songs may (or may not) have been authentic voices of the black experience in America, but shouldn’t they be considered, a generation on, while navel gazing about the skin color of police and judges?

“When you go in anywhere, you would like to come in and see yourself,” said [barber and activist Dewayne “Boo”] Hackney, 42. That means at City Hall, the State House, courtrooms, police departments. “You tend to relax more when you see yourself on the surface.”

That sort of thinking is what needs to change.  If cops were cops and judges were judges, then young black men and women interested in those careers would be cops and judges, not black cops and black judges.  We would see ourselves in each other, even on the surface. Unless the activists want apartheid, even in a perfectly balanced justice system, some people will draw an arresting officer or a judge of another race.

Activist journalists continue to focus on race as if it is not just on the surface.  Suggest that we should move toward an understanding that race is, in fact, superficial, and the likes of WPRO reporter Steve Klamkin will insinuate that you’re advocating for genocide.

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