Jason Riley: Liberals Don’t Want a Discussion about Race

Liberals Don’t Want a Discussion About Race

They’d rather blame white racism for racial disparities in America.

by Jason Riley  at the Wall Street Journal:

Television personalities Raven-Symoné andDon Lemon appear on ABC and CNN, respectively, but what they said last week about the high-school classroom confrontation between a disruptive black teenager and a white sheriff’s deputy in Columbia, S.C., is more commonly heard on Fox News.

The Oct. 26 incident, caught on video, shows the officer forcing a female student to the floor and arresting her after she refuses repeated requests to put away her phone and leave the classroom. After playing the footage on “The View,” Ms. Symoné, a co-host, remarked rather evenhandedly that “there’s no right or reason for him [the officer] to be doing this type of harm—that’s ridiculous—but at the same time you’ve got to follow the rules in school.” Mr. Lemon’s response on CNN was to caution against jumping to conclusions. “[The video] only shows a small slice of time, and I’d like to know more before passing judgment,” he said.

But liberals have no use for evenhandedness or caution when it comes to charged incidents involving blacks and whites, and they immediately took the commentators to task. Mr. Lemon had failed to acknowledge that the video was irrefutable evidence that our racist criminal-justice system targets blacks. And Ms. Symoné had invoked black personal responsibility, which is akin to a capital crime among progressive thinkers. Hence, petitions circulated at both networks calling for Ms. Symoné and Mr. Lemon to be fired.

Don’t expect the hubbub to die down anytime soon. South Carolina’s NAACP president said that “race is indeed a factor” in what happened. The Justice Department is now investigating, and the national media want to have yet another “discussion” about race and discipline in school. What this has meant in the past is a focus on effects rather than causes and the Obama administration cherry-picking data to push a political agenda. When convenient, racial disparities are presented as evidence of racial animus. When inconvenient, racial disparities are ignored.

The Justice Department report released in March on the Ferguson, Mo., police department noted that between 2012 and 2014 “African-Americans account for 85% of vehicle stops,” despite comprising only 67% of Ferguson’s population. But that doesn’t prove racism. It merely shows that different groups—races, ethnicities, ages, genders—have different driving habits.

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