RUTHFULLY YOURS

We have a party in power whose strategy for remaining in power is to divide the country along racial lines. Democrats calculate that urban-centered racialist tribalism, amplified by media and pop-culture allies and underwritten by cowed corporations, can cast mainstream America as a deplorable bastion of white supremacism.

The Republicans, the party out of power, generally lack Senator Scott’s confidence and tact in making the counter-case.

The Department of Justice is a key to the Democrats’ strategy. The Obama-Biden administration politicized the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of our government, peddling with relish the progressive portrayal of an indelibly racist America. They’re ba-ack.

Any good agitprop scheme needs a villain. In the Left’s scheme, the nation’s police fit the bill. The scheme also has an abracadabra element: “disparate impact” theory, which conjures proof of “systemic racism” out of thin air.

The Justice Department is critical because the scheme needs the might of the federal government to impose the non-enforcement approach of progressive “policing” on the whole country. This is exactly the opposite of the way the system is supposed to work.

According to our founding framework, the states are responsible for governing their internal affairs. The Constitution would never have been adopted were it not for the principles of federalism. Nothing is more internal, more close to home, than ensuring law and order so that our neighborhoods can enjoy community, security, and prosperity.

Conditions vary widely in states, counties, cities, towns, and neighborhoods across our country. Each place has different virtues and different problems. America is not suited to, and our Constitution is not intended to impose, a “one size fits all” brand of policing. The kind of protection a particular locale needs is obviously a matter best left to the people who have to live with such decisions, subject to the privileges and immunities of American citizenship, which no majority — and, for that matter, no powerful minority — may deny.

That is truer today than it has ever been.

For over two centuries, including for the first several decades of constitutional governance, black people were subjected to slavery in much of America, and for a century after that, to de jure discrimination and de facto abuse. It would not be reasonable to expect African Americans or the nation at large to ignore that legacy. That the 1619 Project is tendentious fiction does not make these blights on our history any less real.

We demand, as we must, that the whole story be told. It includes the struggle to defeat slavery and oppression, the heroism involved in requiring the United States to live up to its founding ideals. Still, we must never forget the evil that made this valor necessary.

As we examine our past, it is worth tempering our condemnation with humility — to bear in mind that we are no less susceptible to human weakness and galactic error than were our forebears. For all our presumed progress and sophistication, if we’ve arrived at the conclusion that the best way to root out any vestiges of racism is willfully to adopt race-obsessed policies, and to privilege some people over others based on the color of their skin, then we haven’t learned very much. If that’s to be our approach, we will have less common ground with the heroes of the civil-rights movement than with their oppressors.

Well over half a century has gone by since Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racism has long been criminalized. There is no systemic racism in the United States. Institutions that the woke Left condemns as inherently racist — e.g., the education and criminal justice systems, and even government itself — are dominated by progressives for whom hostility to racism is, quite self-consciously, a defining characteristic. The thought that they would tolerate racism in systems they control is laughable. That is why, when inveighing against systemic racism, they never name for us the supposed racists and never acknowledge what they personally have done to perpetuate racism.

Racism was such a dark chapter for our country that, in striving for its extirpation, we adopted anti-discrimination, public-accommodation, and even affirmative-action provisions that are in tension with aspects of liberty and the principle of equal protection under the law. The prudence of some of these provisions is debatable, particularly their effectiveness in achieving their lofty aims. We’ve maintained them nevertheless as a sign of commitment to a society that is repulsed by racism.

The police are guardians of that society. Naturally, when and where de jure racism existed in the United States, it was the police who enforced the laws. When racism continued to be tolerated in a way it is not today, police reflected that reality. It is human nature that the people historically subjected to the resulting abuse are apt to be suspicious of policing.

It is thus right to demand that police not only enforce the laws fairly but go the extra mile to appear to do so. That is not always easy, but any good cop will tell you that nothing makes the job harder than a reputation for bad policing. A big part of being a good cop is projecting respect for the community being protected.

While insisting that police strive to improve, let’s be real. More than ever before, police departments today accurately reflect the communities they serve, particularly in the command ranks. Policing is a hard job, where life-and-death decisions have to be made in a split second, so of course mistakes are going to be made. And policing is a quintessentially human endeavor, which means there will always be some bad cops.

It is a fraud, however, to infer police racism just because, as a class, young black men are stopped, arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated at rates that “over-represent” their roughly 5 percent portion of the total U.S. population. The relevant metric is not population portion — that favorite statistic of the disparate-impact analysts. What matters is offense conduct. It is simply a fact that, as a class, young black men break the law at higher rates than other demographic groups. We know that based not on police observations but on victim reports — reports that also tell us black people are victimized by crime at unacceptably high rates.

That is reality. And it will be reality as long as communities demand safe streets, and as long as, consequently, police are deployed to the streets where crime is rampant and victims cry out for help.

The hustlers will continue to make a living by casting racism as the irredeemable sin. The radical Left will continue to invoke racism to defame America and erode the bonds that unite us as Americans. Yet it is a fact that we have solved racism as a systemic problem in our country. Racism is a human attribute. We can and should discourage it, but racism can no more be wholly eradicated than other forms of hatred and stupidity. There will always be individual racists. But as a society, we have made racism an attitude worthy of ostracism, any manifestation of which is condemnable, and many of which are legally actionable. Systemically, we can’t do more than that.

The big job before us — one of them, anyway — is to improve policing while addressing the underpinnings of crime, including cultural ones. The latter challenge cannot be dealt with by tropes about racism, disparate impact, and our allegedly “carceral state.” It will require working together and caring at least as much about crime’s victims as its perpetrators. That’s what promotes a more perfect union — the opposite of what the race demagogues have in mind.