There's a new Pew Research Center poll out on the various conspiracy theories black people believe in, and it doesn't bode well for racial relations in the U.S. According to the study, 74 percent of Americans believe blacks are put into prison so prisons can make money. The poll also found that 76 percent of black people believe police do little to stop guns and drugs from flowing into their neighborhoods. Given the fact it’d be necessary to put many black men in prison in order to stanch this flow, would this also be perceived as profit-driven? Moreover, the influx of guns and drugs into certain neighborhoods is a lucrative, demand-driven business, and law enforcement can't control demand. The only effective way of interdicting drugs and guns in black neighborhoods would involve rampant violations of constitutional rights.
The general tenor of the Pew poll is that blacks don't trust American institutions, a distrust for which there is an historical basis. The pertinent question for the present, however, is whether or not such beliefs are rooted in reality in 2024. Accurately answering this question is crucial to the improvement of race relations in this country, but the Democratic Party, which has fought to even the playing field for African-Americans, obscures the issue at every opportunity, especially during presidential election years. They're afraid that admitting significant progress has been made will lose them votes. Pretending we’re still back in Jim Crow times is a safer bet for progressives, despite the attendant divisiveness. Politics doesn't get much more cynical.
Democrats need the black vote to win any presidential election, so every four years they ramp up the victimhood rhetoric. That's why we get such distasteful events as Joe Biden’s pandering, buzzkill of a commencement speech last month at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King’s alma mater. For this supposed celebration of a bright future, the President brought up the George Floyd case from 2020 that brought on so much violence in the streets that summer. As it turned out, he went to Morehouse not to do his duty as a commencement speaker—uplift and inspire—but rather as a desperation measure for a presidential campaign that's bleeding black voters.
According to progressives, white, Christian males (especially the rural “bitter clinger” types) are the major oppressor of minorities. Since Biden’s a white, Christian male, his way of clawing himself out of that box was to become the presidential prophet of doom raining on the parade of students who’d worked hard for their college degree. He asked the crowd, “What is democracy when you have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?” Translation: “You've just wasted four years and your parents wasted all their money spent on your education.”
Harping on the possible end to “our democracy” has become such an overused tactic for the Democrats that it's reflexively shoehorned into discussions it has no place in. What a message for the nation's leader to give to a group of young black men who are going to succeed. When Kansas City Chiefs football player, Harrison Butker, allegedly dismissed the value of a college education to female college grads in his recent commencement speech, progressives called him a swivel-eyed fanatic, but the president got this headline from the New York Times: “Biden Draws on Themes of Manhood and Faith at Morehouse Commencement.” What sort of super-manhood and faith are going to give these young men the strength of 10 people just so they can compete in life? Such a feat would require 400-hour work weeks. No amount of faith could enable that.
Is it reality, or is it clinging to a victimhood complex, that makes (according to Pew) 67 percent of black people believe that corporate America markets luxury goods to them to keep them in debt? What's in it for businesses if their potential clients are too broke to pay for anything? Nothing, so big business does this to blacks just out of racial hatred? One has to burrow down into the conspiracy theories to buy such nonsense. It's no secret that the hip-hop stars are the ones glorifying conspicuous wealth and consumption. Back in the 1990s, NWA put it this way: “Life ain't nothing but bitches and money.”
Biden was an unpresidential fear-monger promoting baseless conspiracy theories at Morehouse when he said, “What is democracy when black men are being killed in the streets?” And who's killing them? Black-on-black homicides account for 88 percent of all homicides against blacks. So if black lives really do matter, why do progressives refuse to talk about this?
Maybe Biden was suggesting the police are gunning down black men in the streets. NBC reports, “Black people, who account for 13 percent of the U.S. population, accounted for 27 percent of those fatally shot and killed by police in 2021, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit group that tracks police shootings. That means black people are twice as likely as white people to be shot and killed by police officers.”
What NBC, like most of the media, leaves out is that that 13 percent of the population accounts for 36 percent of those arrested for serious, non-fatal crimes, including rape, robbery, and assault. Moreover, while whites outnumber blacks by five-to-one, blacks account for several thousand more murders per year than whites. Given these stats, is there a reasonable expectation that police killings would be proportional to a group’s representation in the population?
Despite Biden’s performative rhetoric, black people are only of interest to him when an election's coming up. And then he gets so worked up that he sounds unhinged. Instead of invoking the memory of Morehouse’s own Martin Luther King—a voice of hope—Biden reverted to his 2012 mode when he told a black audience that Mitt Romney would “put y'all back in chains.” And how could anyone forget when Biden told a black man, “You ain't black if you don't vote for me,” putting his racist, white-savior complex on repugnant display.
Under Biden, hope and change has devolved into doom and gloom, as admitting there's been racial progress would rob him of a talking point. That's why he brought up the four-year-old story of the George Floyd murder, which the nation has already paid a high price for. In fact, his entire speech was backward-looking, a bizarre choice given that he was at a celebration of the future.
Though Americans have a variety of experiences, we also live in an objective reality in which the facts can't vary depending on the identity of the person speaking. If they do, there's no possibility of having conversations that could narrow the racial divide. The Democrats, despite their self-serving rhetoric, show little interest in such conversations.