Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley wants everyone to know the plight of black people is all liberals' fault. He's so convinced of this that he wrote a whole book about how liberals do harm to African-Americans.
Truth is, Jason Riley makes his living bashing black people. He has no qualifications to pronounce judgment other than his career-long tenure at the Wall Street Journal, the only employer he has had. Spend enough time with money-obsessed corporatists and you just might become one.
This might be why he opined so ridiculously on a post-racial America as if he actually thinks he knows what that is. Does anyone know what that is? We all have an idea of it, but it's not like it exists right now, nor has it ever existed. Race is a part of who we are. The problem isn't race. The problem is the disparity in treatment of different racial groups, and there has never been a time where that disparity has been absent in this country.
On the left, we've tried to deal with it in various ways. Some enjoyed success, others failed. Ta-Nahesi Coates, for example, called for reparations in order to lower the inequality between African-Americans and whites with regard to income, education and wealth accumulation.
Whatever is or is not being done about this, liberals at least acknowledge that there are serious differences in how people of different races are treated. But that doesn't stop Mr. Riley, who is so pickled in Wall Street Journal claptrap he doesn't realize how utterly ridiculous he sounds here.
From the transcript:
WALLACE: Jason, how do you explain it? With an African-American president in a country that some people said was post-racial, how do you explain the fact that we're having this debate over race and the criminal justice system and it's still so raw?
RILEY: Well, part of it is the left has no interest in being post-racial. I think they pretend to want to be post-racial, but they practice identity politics, which is divvying us up by race and gender and sexual orientation, and making specific appeals based on those characteristics.
So, I think the whole notion that the left wants to be post-racial is false. And this is I think demonstrates that. What we see with this false narrative being pushed in the wake of the Garner and the Ferguson incidents.
The problem is not police shooting black men. That is not what is driving the homicide rate in this country. It is non-police shootings of black men that is driving the homicide rate, yet we have protesters all over this country pushing a false narrative and everyone from the president on down refusing to simply correct the record here.
Oh, Jason Riley. I will gladly correct the record. First of all, the homicide rate has decreased by 54 percent since 1995 overall, though it has been on the rise in the past couple of years.
Secondly, these remarks come dangerously close to the distraction of "black-on-black" crime that Fox News and other conservatives love to use as a talking point. A talking point, by the way, which has been debunked over and over and over again.
There is no false narrative in Ferguson or the Eric Garner case, or the Tamir Rice case, or the John Crawford case. These are all instances where police killed unarmed black men because they feared the outcome if they didn't. Garner, Rice, Brown and Crawford are representative of black men who are profiled each and every day. That's provable and true.
The whole black-on-black murder rate meme is a distraction from the real issue, which is the disparate treatment of black men by police. When Riley can point to any situation where a white guy is shot dead within two seconds for the crime of holding a gun-like object in his hands, we can maybe talk. But to me, that's going in the wrong direction.
The real conversation is whether it makes any sense at all to have as many guns as we've got on the streets, whether in Chicago or Beverly Hills. I won't hold my breath waiting for Riley's opinion on that, but at least there's a record debunking his bull about who does and doesn't want a post-racial society.
