One thing that liberals have done quite effectively is take advantage of our collective ignorance by re-writing the past. Under their worldview, the Allies were complicit in the Holocaust; America was a hateful and oppressive hell-hole until the mid-60s; women had no jobs or other opportunities before the rise of feminism in the 70s; and blacks were uniformly oppressed, held down, disrespected, and mistreated for no reason by racist whites. Just as liberals rewrite the past, they rewrite the present. We all know of the rape accusation levied against the Duke Lacrosse team. Do we know there are higher rates of crime among Hispanic and black communities? Do we know about the black-on white horrors of Auburn, UNC Chapel Hill, and Knoxville?
Consider how the following story from Time Magazine in 1957 reveals the innacuracy and moral poverty of the standard leftist account of “our racist past”:
The most ticklish law-enforcement fact in many a big Northern city is that the crime rate among Negroes is far higher than that of any other segment of the population—and few elected officials want to antagonize vote-conscious Negroes by saying so. None knew this better than the unhappy city fathers of Kansas City, Mo., who, during the first three weeks of 1957, saw the number of armed robberies, burglaries and thefts run 40% beyond the 1956 rate, while four out of five robbery victims reported that the holdup men were Negroes.
One day last fortnight, seven Negro businessmen called on Kansas City’s Police Chief Bernard Brannon to complain that robberies and burglaries in the Negro district were threatening to put them out of business. Suddenly, Chief Brannon thought he saw his chance.
How would Negro leaders react if the police staged a mass raid on Negro nightspots to round up suspects? asked Brannon tentatively. To his surprise, the businessmen assured him that they would speak up to defend the police if the Negro community raised an outcry. A few nights later, in Kansas City’s biggest police raid since 1941, nine teams of detectives—with at least one Negro cop on each team —stormed into Negro-district bars, restaurants, pool halls, nightclubs. Three paddy wagons shuttled back and forth for three hours, hauling 276 men and three women to headquarters for questioning. The police released most of the suspects that night or the next day, but held 50 on assorted charges from shoplifting to narcotics peddling. Acting on tips from men arrested in the raid, the cops jailed another score of suspects, including holdup men who had pulled off 49 known robberies within the previous two months.
Consider all the details: black businessmen partnering with law enforcement; a major national magazine candidly discussing higher rates of black crime; politicians (then as now) afraid to anger voters of any race; pre-Miranda law enforcement actions that still preserved the rights of the innocent; cooperation among black leaders with the white “city fathers” against the black lower classes; and, an aggressive, but popular, approach to crime that employed racial profiling, but cannot reasonably be called racist.
The Time search engine is a real asset, a way to look into the past without the filter of today’s propaganda-laden universities and journalists. It shows a healthy, sometimes complicated, American past that belies the tales of woe and misery that Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama have spun in recent weeks.
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Hi,
I just published a blog entry based on yours. Your point is that race relations before the civil rights era weren’t as awful as people think they were. I go even farther: the article you’ve cited proves that race relations were much saner and more harmonious in the 50s than today.
This is a great blog. Keep it up.
I forgot to mention that my blog is The Inverted World. Just click on my name.
Oh come on. The fact that the central government is finally asserting control over Basra is a bad thing, or that supposed Iranian pawns are fighting Tehran’s most favored agents in Iraq is cause for wailing and gnashing of teeth?
I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. It does happen to be the wrong way, however. Almost as though you are wedded to the “see, told you so” argument a temptation we all share in the punditry hobby, but one that undermines our credibility something fierce.