Liberals Choose Racial Catharsis Over Progress for Blacks
What happened in Tulsa 100 years ago matters far
less than what’s happening in Chicago today.
President
Biden traveled to Tulsa, Okla., Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of a race
riot that destroyed a prosperous black community and is estimated to have left
hundreds of people dead. The trip recalls President Obama’s 2015 trip to Selma,
Ala., where police had beaten and tear-gassed peaceful civil-rights protesters
50 years earlier.
These historical milestones are
certainly worthy of commemoration. Properly understood, they demonstrate how
much racial progress has been made in this country in a relatively short time.
Yet for progressives and their friends in the media, the events are also an
opportunity to push for racial preferences and bigger government. The goal is
to link today’s racial disparities to past wrongs and to play down or ignore
the far more significant role that contemporary black behavior plays in social
inequality.
When a National Public Radio reporter
asked George Patrick Evans, Selma’s mayor, how events of 50 years ago fit into
the “current conversation about race relations,” he balked at the question.
“I’m not sure how it fits,” Mr. Evans, who is black, replied. “We have a lot
more crime going on in 2015 all over this country than we had in 1965.
Segregation existed but we didn’t have the crime.” Asked about the city’s high
black unemployment rate, he still refused to racialize the issue: “Well, from
the standpoint of jobs, we have lots of jobs. It’s just that a lot of people do
not have the skill level to man these jobs. And that’s the biggest problem we
have.”
In the run-up to Mr. Biden’s Tuesday
address, the White House announced several new initiatives to “combat housing
discrimination” and increase the amount of federal contracting with
minority-owned small businesses. Putting aside the dubious legality of
race-based government assistance, it’s worth noting that the black residents of
Tulsa 100 years ago didn’t wait around for the federal government to come to
their rescue. Within two decades of the riots, homes and churches had been
rebuilt, and black-owned businesses again anchored the community.
The
political left is much more interested in black suffering than in black
accomplishment, but black history is about more than victimization at the hands
of whites. It’s also about what blacks have achieved notwithstanding that
victimization. And in the first half of the 20th century, long before an
expanded welfare state supposedly came to the rescue, blacks accomplished quite
a lot. Incomes rose, poverty fell dramatically, and education gaps narrowed.
Blacks entered the skilled professions—medicine, law, accounting, engineering,
social work—at faster rates in the years preceding the 1960s civil-rights
legislation than they did in the years afterward. Among racial and ethnic groups
rising from similar circumstances, historians have described the rapidity of
these gains as unprecedented.
Black Tulsa residents of a century ago
would also be shocked to learn that it is no longer racist white vigilantes but
black criminals who pose the bigger threat to safety in black communities.
Liberals blame today’s disproportionately high black criminality on the
“legacy” of slavery and Jim Crow. But violent crime among blacks declined in
the 1940s, then dropped even further in the 1950s, while remaining relatively
stable among whites. In other words, blacks living during Jim Crow segregation,
and much closer to the era of slavery, experienced significantly lower rates of
violent crime and incarceration both in absolute terms and relative to whites.
The Biden administration would much
rather discuss white criminal behavior in Tulsa 100 years ago than black
criminal behavior in Chicago, Baltimore or St. Louis today. Likewise in his
Selma address, Mr. Obama invoked high-profile police shootings, “unfair
sentencing” and “voter suppression,” giving the impression that little had
changed in the past 50 years, his own election and re-election notwithstanding.
Liberals focus on this history of black suffering rather than success because
it helps Democrats get elected and activists raise money. What’s less clear is
how any of this helps the black underclass improve its situation.
This country’s racist past should never
be forgotten or sugarcoated, but neither should it be used as a blanket
explanation for present disparities. History teaches us that the progress of
blacks and other minorities in the U.S. is not conditioned on racial tolerance.
Asian-Americans are one of any number of groups that have faced racism and mob
violence. One of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history targeted Chinese
immigrants in Los Angeles, and Japanese-Americans were put in internment camps
during World War II. Today, both groups outperform whites academically and
economically and have for decades.
The left’s focus on the past behavior
of whites, while ignoring the present behavior of blacks, might offer some
people catharsis, and it might help groups like the NAACP or Black Lives Matter
stay relevant. But where is the evidence that such an approach facilitates
black upward mobility?
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