[UNZ] America’s most enduring problem, the problem of the blacks, has been dominating the news this week.
The attitude I bring to these news stories is one of weary despair. They are reported and discussed publicly in language that bears very little relation to reality, so that most of what is said and written is worthless. To speak honestly about race is in fact taboo, and genuinely shocking, for most Americans.
Here’s an example. Back in 2016 a black man in Charlotte, North Carolina was shot dead by a cop, also black. There were protests, riots, vandalism, and looting. A Republican local congressman, Robert Pittenger, said the following thing:
The grievance in their minds—the animus, the anger—they hate white people, because white people are successful and they’re not.
Congressman: Charlotte protesters ’hate white people because white people are successful’, by Peter Holley, Washington Post, September 23, 2016
Nailed it, Congressman. But of course, Pittenger was denounced by all the Great and the Good, and to save his career, issued a groveling retraction.
I’ve been living in America since the second Nixon administration, with some intermissions. For many years I assumed that this clinging to unreality could not be stable; that truth and honesty would eventually prevail; that we’d learn to speak to each other openly and frankly, citizen to citizen.
To my dismay and despair, the opposite has happened. As the years pass, we drift further and further from reality and truth, deeper and deeper into fantasy and denial. It’s very depressing; like being in a plane that’s lost all power and is just going down, down, down.
I love this country; I have two kids who will live out their lives here. Yet it’s hard to see any hope for America when the landscape of social commentary is smothered in shallow lies and infantile delusions. |