The Toxic Effort to Blame White Supremacy for Heinous Murders

Recently, the world was horrified by the death of a black man in Memphis after a traffic stop.  After receiving 71 commands in 13 minutes, that were often contradictory, unachievable, and impossible, Mr. Nichols was beaten to death by five black Memphis police officers.  In addition, to administering a bloody beating, the cops failed to respond professionally and proportionately to acts of defiance.  

Equally alarming news surfaced two weeks ago regarding the killing of at least 18 Asians by two Asian men in three separate incidents in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California.  Replicating the May 2022 killings by an Asian immigrant who opened fire on innocents at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, California, the motives for mass murder appeared different in each case.  The accused perpetrators were all Asian men of retirement age who, within the past year, expressed their bitterness by shooting people in the very places where Asian immigrants go to escape isolation.

On the surface, the killing in Memphis is unrelated to the violence which rocked the Asian community in California.  Still, there is a connection, which emerges in the overheated rhetoric of commentators claiming the deaths were driven by white supremacy.  After bludgeoning America repeatedly, charges of white supremacy have unleashed an accusatory firestorm.

For example, Van Jones, a CNN commentator, made the case that the death of Mr. Nichols “still might have been driven by racism” because all police officers internalize “anti-black” messaging.  Such messages, Jones argues, prompt black police officers in black neighborhoods to brutalize and abuse fellow blacks.  Jones’s provocative claims suggest that unarmed black citizens are much more likely to be killed by police than whites.  Such claims are true but ignore two things.  First, such claims disregard Dr. Mark Goldfeder’s brilliant analysis, indicating that officials must demonstrate that a target’s protected trait or status was the precise reason for the alleged adverse treatment before discrimination is charged.  In other words, Van Jones failed to demonstrate cause and effect.  Second, since the black violent crime rate is roughly 2.5 times the white rate, Jones fails to explain why Americans should expect equality in police-involved incidents before equality is achieved in the commission of crimes. 

When demographic variables are considered, it is doubtful that there are any racial differences in the rate of police-involved shootings.  Despite such evidence and embracing the claim that systemic racism invades the nation, many commentators in 2019 accepted the false narrative that 1,000 unarmed African American males were killed in police-involved shootings.  The actual number was less than twenty during that year and less than ten as of the last week of 2021.  Notwithstanding the data, U. S. Representative Cori Bush asserts that charging the Memphis police officers who attacked Tyre Nichols with murder is not enough.  Accepting Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse’s revolutionary thesis that members of identity groups are victims of oppression, she avows that “[t]he mere presence of Black officers fails to prevent policing from being used as a tool of white supremacy” because the police system is rooted in enslavement.  

Not to be outdone, commentator Pictoria Vark implies that the Asians who died in Monterey Park were casualties of “white supremacy.”  She asserts that the possibility that the shooter was Asian is nothing less than a straw man because white supremacy moves invisibly through people to reach its only goal.  By contrast, several Asian journalists linked the shootings to the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic but also suggested other factors—loneliness, isolation, and mental health issues—were in play.  

Such balanced views cannot prevent liberal commentators from insisting that white supremacy is always at fault when Asians become crime victims.  After the nation experienced a genuine rise in violent crimes targeting Asian Americans in 2020, many commentators insisted that the attacks were driven by racial extremists, even though the data show that violence against Asian Americans is a diverse affair.  Wilfred Reilly destabilizes the white racism thesis by observing that the 2019 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicates that 27.5 percent of violent criminals targeting Asian victims are black, and only 24.1 percent are white.  

As I show in my forthcoming book, Requiem for Reality: Critical Race Theocrats and Social Justice Dystopia, the effort to blame white supremacy for every disaster that hits minorities has many authors.  Blame is grounded in a totalitarian vision surfacing from people who have difficulty coping with reality as it is but are content to manipulate others by constructing a pseudo-reality that serves a vision of the world that suits their deep-seated needs.  As James Lindsay shows, those ensnared in this worldview have difficulty distinguishing reality from faux reality.  This leads to logical errors. 

Claiming that America is irredeemably oppressive and driven by his Neo-Marxist faith, Ibram X. Kendi states that the only remedy for past discrimination by whites is present discrimination in favor of blacks; the sole remedy for present discrimination against blacks is future discrimination against whites.  Embracing such sentiments and offering the prayers of a weary black woman, public theologian Chanequa Walker-Barnes exclaims: “Lord, if it be, your will, harden my heart … Stop me from being hopeful that White people can do and be better.  Let me imagine them instead as white-hooded robes standing in front of burning crosses” before they are turned over to the evil one.  

Likewise, Seattle’s social justice warriors responded to George Floyd’s death by fashioning a victimhood Olympics grounded on a reverse hierarchy of oppression.  Elevating Native Americans, blacks, and transwomen as the highest authority, they called upon whites to engage in endless atonement rituals.  Steeped in unreality, Kendi, Walker-Barnes, and Seattle’s social justice warriors decline to appreciate that systemic racism fails to explain ethnic differences in standardized test scores, incarceration rates, and incomes.  Indeed, the most successful ethnic groups in the United States include Syrian Americans, Taiwanese Americans, second-generation West Indian blacks, and Indian Americans. 

While Americans shouldn’t tolerate the murderous misconduct of the Memphis police, and while citizens should be distraught about mass killings of Asian citizens, it is clear that the nation has been invaded by corporate, religious, political, academic, and social media leaders, who refuse to face difficult facts.  Preferring to flee reality, they advance false claims of white supremacy and racial essentialism.  These unsupportable moves do nothing to hold the Memphis police and the murderers of Asian citizens responsible for their crimes.  Rather than seriously examine the country’s issues, America’s overlords castigate the values of members of America’s working and middle classes while holding Americans hostage to a false but politically profitable narrative.  Meanwhile, conditions worsen in minority enclaves as progressive ideologues gain power by profiting from rising crime tied inextricably to defunding the police and lowering bail.