Dubious Lessons….. “Also, Water is Wet” Part 1

By Patrick Hall

“We in the African American community have cried wolf so often that we have
inadvertently made our neighborhoods unsafe. If the police hesitate to act
against the violence and incivility in many inner-city communities, who can
blame them?”

I penned those words nearly thirty years ago in Commonweal Magazine. Back then, as it is in 2025, the supposed systemic discord between law enforcement and the black community was laid at the feet of systemic racism and the calculated targeting of black men by the police. Although, as I pointed out then, the real day-to-day threats that persist in far too many inner-city communities don’t come from the police. They emanate from kinetic criminal activity mostly generated or authored by young, and many cases not so young, black folks. However, as we fast forward to 2025 and the current body politic surrounding blacks and the dubious lessons of police brutality being successfully imprinted by the Democratic political class, Black Lives Matter apologists, NAACP, and many guilt-ridden corporate donors, it is little more than selective moral outrage. At the same time, it guarantees that black criminals will continue to murder, steal, and author any number of criminal offenses in urban communities throughout the nation.  Racist law enforcement, buttressed by a systemically racist American culture, will always serve as the fall guy. Once again, it is little more than dangerously misguided, if not selective moral outrage.

In the case of corporate donors of BLM as well as Rev Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN), (e.g., Amazon, DoorDash, Cisco, Airbnb, Microsoft, to name a few), they behave like supplicants in Pre-Reformation Christendom, paying indulgences to the race-industry gods in an attempt to cleanse the endemic racism that lurks in the American soul.  Progressive Liberal Democrats are fond of “grace on the cheap.” It is a kind of socio-political virtue signaling.

Sidebar:  It is much like their sanctuary city policies, which violate “Federal” immigration law, that President Trump is currently addressing by employing the military in concert with local law enforcement to clean up the mess and deadly existential realities left by the Biden Administration.

At the same time, little is done to address the real culprit of the societal anomie that afflicts the black underclass. That would take far too much introspection, when it is easier to blame or find fault with the other. In this case, it is always the rampant and out-of-control epidemic of police brutality, anchored by the tiresome (if not effective) bromide of systemic or institutional racism. It is just plain easier, if not intellectually lazy, to worship at and participate in endless secular benedictions to the dogma of structural and/or institutional racism.

Sidebar: Black Folks and Racism (?)
Some of the biggest racists you ever want to meet are Black.  Yes, I know academics and “really smart” black people and DEI catechumenates have told us for decades that blacks can’t be racist because they lack power. That explanation should have been met with a big “ah” or what the hell are you talking about, by those of us who should have known better and pushed back on this profane catechetic.   What does power have to do with the fact that someone could hate your “white, brown, or black ass,” plus do awful things to you to boot, because of some immutable characteristics? To say that people of any particular American racial and/or ethnic minority can’t be racist is absurd. It is only because of a definitional sleight of hand by the cultural left dating back to the late 19th and early 20th Century, propped-up by the 1960s black power movement, concurrent with segments of the Civil Rights movement after the death of Martin Luther King, that this toxic cultural heresy was given life. To paraphrase the words of the late Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Antonia Scalia, if you are willing to reject traditional definitions of racism (which were done by the Progressive movement since the 1950s) and invent your own, you can prove that anyone who believes in the Sun is racist.

 Decades ago, some people adjusted the meaning of the word to include the power to harm another group. Those who lacked the power could not be racist. This seems to have been done to excuse behavior and speech that would be abhorrent if done by a white person. Before, racism or being a racist referred to an “attitude” or set of opinions, not a power relationship, which the cultural left and their Marxist mentors brought to the definition.

Whether we like it or not, every culture and people have some amount of racism. You can debate whether some have more than others, but that's beside the point. It still exists!  Denying that is like denying that water is wet. However, listening to slick-talking politicians like former President Obama and California Governor Gavin Newsom, one would think their logic is Aristotelian.

Liberal Progressives, both Democrats and some Republicans, along with BLM, Antifa, the mainstream media, George Soros-supported NGO’s, misguided professional athletes, Liberal Progressive Church leaders, have all drunk deeply from the well of tribalism, factionalism, and balkanization masquerading as social justice and/or supporting “diversity.”  Additionally, another active participant in creating cultural discord in our nation has been the Chinese Communist Party. Sadly, this dubious choreography pitting law enforcement against black Americans will continue.  Quite frankly, it has been a successful business model of the post-JFK Democratic Party.  It will not change, that is, if it is ever recognized!

The police are deliberately placed in a Heads-You-Lose, Tails-You-Lose situation. You can literally have millions of constructive interactions between the police and the communities they serve. However, let one shooting of a black person (often a criminal) go awry (such as Michael Brown, George Floyd, or whoever), and we will be greeted with the media-driven hysterics of police brutality.