Charles Blow and Black Victimhood

Last night, in an appearance on CNN, New York Times columnist Charles Blow chalked up Black Lives Matter marchers chanting, “Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon,” as a justified reaction to an American society that is “arrayed against black people.“

Black liberals like Charles Blow examine contemporary America through the lens of a victim-focused racial identity. In his mind, America is, always was, and always will be a devoutly racist place. And if you are black in America, you should never expect to achieve any meaningful socioeconomic success simply because of the barriers American racism permit.

Blow’s brand of Blame White America First hinders him from facing facts about black criminality. While he concedes that black people experience “disparate interactions with police,” Blow simply cannot consider that black criminality has a correlative affect on the disproportionately large number of encounters that black people have with police.

For Charles Blow, that black people face “disparate interactions with police” is another example of “structural racism” in America.

But I challenge Chalres Blow to prove how racism explains blacks in Oakland, California accounting for 28 percent of the population but making up “83 percent of the 12,161 suspects in last year’s homicides, attempted homicides, robberies, assaults with firearms and assaults with weapons other than firearms,” according to Chip Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle.

He can’t.

Blow bemoans how black people face “longer sentences” for drug crimes. But because Charles Blow is blinded by victimhood, he refuses to ask how racism explains the Congressional Black Caucus’ support of this drug policy.

“Eleven of the twenty-one blacks who were then members of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the law which created the 100-to-1 crack–powder differential,” wrote Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy. One of those black lawmakers was Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel. He, like many other black Congressmen in 1986, was interested in dismantling the crack cartel that was consuming countless black neighborhoods. The focus 30 years ago for black federal lawmakers was less on white New York stock brokers doing a few lines of powder cocaine in some big city nightclub and more on a crack culture that was fueling a lawlessness that had began to suffocate black communities.

Nevertheless, Charles Blow sees these uneven sentences as another example of “structural racism” in America.

Blow believes that “historical illiteracy and incuriousness creates the comfortable distance on which pernicious structural racism lies.” So, Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof wouldn’t have massacred nine people praying if only he had become more historically literate and more racially curious? If only Darren Wilson had taken more African American studies classes, he wouldn’t have shot and killed Michael Brown.

Blow’s credulity-strecthing, garden variety illogic is accepted scripture among a white liberal readership that lives in a constant state of fear of having to ever consider that black people might share some responsibility for their lot in life.

We are asked to have a conversation about the “devaluation” of black lives in America. But we must never ask what role black people play in the equation. The hegemony of black victimhood forbids liberal blacks and guilt-driven whites from even asking such questions.

Charles Blow once wrote, “There are realities that must not be ignored or minimized.”

Okay. Consider this reality: In 2012, white males were 38 percent of the population and committed 4,582 murders. That same year, black males were just 6.6 percent of the population but committed a whopping 5,531 murders.

For Blow and those like him, the aforementioned figures are the result of racism and nothing else. That I as a black man chose not to “ignore” and “minimize” the disproportionate problem of black crime makes me an accessory to the so-called oppression of black Americans.

This is madness.

If black lives truly matter to Charles Blow, he should start confronting the main driver of American-American oppression: black brutality and criminality.