Tire Nichols, an unarmed 29-year-old African American, was recently brutally beaten to death by five Black Memphis police officers. They were charged with murder. All belonged to a special criminal unit known as the Scorpions.
Both perpetrators and victims were black. The Memphis police chief is black. The deputy chief of police is Black.
About 60% of the police are black. The white population of Memphis is about 25%.
The now disbanded Scorpion Unit, made up of mostly black officers, was created as a response to grassroots appeals to stop the surge in crime in mostly black neighborhoods.
Tyre Nichols’ death can be attributed to many things: police officers’ basic humanity, lack of police training, lax administrative oversight, declining hiring standards, and more.
Instead, accusations of “systemic racism” surfaced as soon as the beating death was announced.
Van Jones, a former Obama administration green tsar and recent winner of Jeff Bezos’ $100 million “courage and civility award,” says black police oppressors play out white racism on CNN. declared in
Some argued that indicting five black police officers for murder was in itself racist. He claimed to be a racist.
Still, when everything becomes racist, it cannot be particularly racist.
Around the same time, the city of San Francisco, along with the state of California, was considering paying huge reparations to its African-American residents for the ancestral sins of slavery.
That evil institution was abolished some 158 years ago through the Civil War, which killed about 700,000 Americans.
Yet California has always been a free state and had no history of slavery.
In six generations, no American resident has been a slave or a slave owner.
Billions of dollars in payments like this are apparently being financed by a state on the verge of bankruptcy facing a $25 billion budget shortfall.
How do you quantify current eligibility or negligence liability in multiethnic California, where 27% of residents were not born in the United States? Whites make up only 35% of the state’s population.
On college campuses, more and more racially segregated residential housing is getting the go-ahead.
These reactionaries seem eager to return to the “separate but equal” apartheid that was supposedly outlawed nearly 60 years ago by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
A recent study by the National Association of Scholars found that 42% of the approximately 173 schools surveyed offer segregated housing. About 46% offered a racist orientation program. An overwhelming 72% hosted a segregated graduation ceremony.
So-called “safe spaces” on campus exclude students based on race. Especially white people who are reduced to stereotypical members of toxic populations.
Race-based admissions have evolved from proportional representation, which had to broadly reflect the racial makeup of a nation, to compensatory or compensatory admissions.
For example, Stanford University’s 2026 admissions class lists white students in 22% of its enrollees. That’s about a third of the general US population.
Ironically, current racial engineering is reviving old quota systems used to discriminate against Jews in the past.
“White” does not fit the currently rigid definition of the exploitative majority, in so far as it can identify race in a biracial, multiethnic society.
In most major American cities and some states, they no longer make up the majority.
They lag far behind many non-white ethnic groups in terms of per capita income, and millions of working-class Americans certainly don’t fit the tired stereotype of “privilege.” Hmm.
In a racist fashion, white men are often vilified for exhibiting collective “white anger.”
However, they are demographically twice as likely to commit suicide and more than twice as often as blacks and Latinos.
They have also been killed in battles in Afghanistan and Iraq in double the numbers of the general population.
Whites are demographically underrepresented when it comes to hate crime offenders. White Jews are the most victims of hate crimes.
Whites commit violent crimes against people of all races at a lower rate than in the general population.
In short, class, not race, remains the best litmus test for being underprivileged in America. It is no longer synonymous with race.
No wonder the identity politics industry is now straining to prefix “racism” with “systematic” or “implicit”, “aggression” with “micro”, and so on.
Pause to reflect that America is the only successful multiethnic constitutional republic in history.
America’s unique ideas need unity to survive in an increasingly dysfunctional and hostile world abroad.
But national unity is possible only when citizens subordinate their tribal interests to a common culture. Only then will they cease to be the automatons of warring tribes and groups.
As Benjamin Franklin once warned, Americans must come together as the world becomes more and more frightening.
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About the lighter
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(Victor Davis Hanson is a Distinguished Fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of World War II: How the First World Conflict Wounded. He is also the author of Did We Win? You can contact him by email at authorvdh@gmail.com.)
