In Milwaukee, a black police officer shot a black man who attempted to flee from him while carrying a stolen gun, and then turned on the officer. Riots have ensued. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, the Department of Justice has declared the city’s police department – which is majority minority, with a heavy concentration of black officers – racist.
All of which raises the question: what are police departments supposed to do?
The left has created a catch-22 for itself. While rioters declare their intention to target white Milwaukee residents and scream about “black power” while burning down a gas station, the media maintain that there’s no racism here – it’s just a response to generalized police racism. But if black people are incapable of racism, what do leftists say about black police officers, who they then accuse of racism?
There are two possible reasons why the left can claim that black police officers are capable of racism, while black protesters aren’t. First, leftists can claim that black police officers aren’t truly black – they, like black Republicans, have been corrupted by the racist policing system. German Lopez of Vox.com wrote just that in April, when he stated:
Racial bias isn’t necessarily about how a person views himself in terms of race, but how he views others in terms of race, particularly in different roles throughout his everyday life. And systemic racism, which has been part of the US since its founding, can corrupt anyone’s view of minorities in America…. policing tactics can also create and accentuate personal, subconscious bias by increasing the likelihood that officers will relate blackness with criminality or danger — leading to what psychologists call “implicit bias” against black Americans. Combined, this means the system as a whole — as well as individual officers, even black ones — by and large act in ways that are deeply racially skewed and, potentially, racist.
That’s rather convenient logic – police departments make black officers racist against blacks, but what Sheriff David Clarke terms the “ghetto” mentality doesn’t generate black racism against whites. Reverse racism, Lopez says, is impossible.
Then there’s the second possibility: black police officers aren’t turned into racists by police departments, police departments are merely the enforcement mechanisms for a racist society. That’s the perspective of former Obama Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, who once told me in a CNN green room that black Americans jumped to conclusions about police shootings because, “You’re Jewish, right? Wouldn’t you jump to conclusions if you heard that the Nazis or Hamas had killed a Jew?”
In this view, American society is irredeemably racist, and those who wear police uniforms are just the brownshirts out enforcing that racism.
This is outright dangerous. It would also explain why looters and rioters attack shops owned by black Americans – those shops are simply tools of the evil racist capitalist system holding down blacks. If the entire system is corrupt, any instruments of the system must burn, from cops to gas stations.
One thing is certain: the conflict between cops and black rioters won’t be calmed by additional police training, and it definitely won’t be calmed by politicians continuing to press the myth that police are racially targeting black men for no reason. The only way such conflict will be calmed is, ironically, via the only mechanism the left will never tolerate: stronger, more prominent law enforcement, and cooperation with local communities.
That’s just what the left will never allow. And so the racial conflagrations will continue, and black Americans will be the ones who pay the price.