Many imbalances or inequities in our culture result from the same problem. The failure of “the state” to put academic rigor ahead of politics. And who runs “the state”? Bureaucrats, financed by the DC uniparty, which is run by Democrats.
The uniparty agenda is the Democrat party agenda. Regardless of any other affectation (party registration or lack of it), those who claim allegiance to its goals are advancing progressive policy. So, when I say “The Democrats,” I mean those in and out of that political closet—a bulwark that objects to even allowing alternatives to its preferred solutions. A political establishment that has taken America’s major cities and converted them from beacons of productivity and opportunity into hi-rise homeless camps littered with poop, dirty needles, underperforming schools, poverty, and crime.
It is not racism to point out, as Heather MacDonald did in a recent issue of Imprimis, that,
In the post-George Floyd era, black juveniles are shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. Blacks between the ages of ten and 24 are killed in drive by shootings at nearly 25 times the rate of whites in that same age cohort. Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are just 13 percent of the population. The country turns its eyes away. Who is killing these black victims? Not the police, not whites, but other blacks.
As for interracial violence, blacks are a greater threat to whites than whites are to blacks. Blacks commit 85 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites. A black person is 35 times more likely to commit an act of non-lethal violence against a white person than vice versa. Yet the national narrative insists on the opposite idea—and too many dutifully play along.
This situation results from deliberate choices by policymakers running the cities where these disparities are an everyday fact of life. Before the George-Floyd Era, Democrats ran those police departments for decades before deciding it was to their advantage to label them as racist. Democrats set standards and curriculum for city schools (also) for decades. Democrats also established and funded bottomless bureaucracies to protect political power and coddled Unions that kept them in office at the expense of children and families (primarily minorities in their cities) and still do.
In 2019, 66 percent of all black 12th graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th grade math skills, defined as being able to do arithmetic and to read a graph. Only seven percent of black 12th graders were proficient in 12th grade math, defined as being able to calculate using ratios. The number of black 12th graders who were advanced in math was too small to show up statistically in a national sample. The picture was not much better in reading. Fifty percent of black 12th graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic reading, and only four percent were advanced.
It is not just black kids (or any minority in a public school system) that suffer similar outcomes. The proficiency numbers in primarily white New Hampshire are not nearly as tragic but are in decline, and the expense-to-results ratios in education are similar. You spend more and get a worse outcome and you’d be right to suspect that this is the equity they are looking for – make ’em all too dumb to resist.
And it is not just a problem in America. Theodore Dalrymple wrote of a similar cascade of failure in England many years ago. The government-run progressive culture, in the furtherance of goals you are welcome to guess at yourself, results in a rising number of single-parent “homes.” Generation after generation of fatherless kids lived on government subsidies from cradle to grave, unable to escape or improve their lives because of unsupervised upbringing and a public education that left them with declining options to better their situation. A few escape, but crime is easy (especially in disarmed England), so it fills the gap at the expense of the culture and its victims. At the same time, drugs help whoever chooses them to escape the misery of having a failed, disinterested institution as a daddy that will happily lock them up (and feed and house them) if they get caught doing anything too inappropriate to ignore.
For many, prison will be an improvement. Put that on your campaign bumper sticker.
In America, the ‘Democrats’ have decided to stop arresting their “urban offspring,” perhaps out of guilt at what they’ve done but more likely because the chaos that follows is just another thing they can blame on someone else. An angle they can work to accumulate power.
And note that it is not racist when this happens in poor white communities (in and around Applaicha, for example), but both are a byproduct of progressive priorities on both sides of The Pond. To hide these failures, the Left has erected entire systems from DEI to CRT, which erase any pretext that education is about anything other than preparing future generations for a two-class system in which those truly responsible never pay a political price because they have adequately convinced you that what they did in the past and to your future is someone else’s fault.
The problem is the Democrat agenda and those who aid and abet it, but much like the swamp in DC, you can’t replace one or two moving parts for a term or two and expect a different result. You need to flush the system and then support the replacements. And it doesn’t have to be violent, but you can’t help but think they hope it is.
