The Unmentionable, Unspeakable, and Unutterable. Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

Crime Everywhere

Now we come to the current crime wave.

We see weekly YouTube videos of the knock-out game, of Saturday night Al Capone-gangland massacring, of vulnerable joggers raped and killed, of a mother and her daughter carjacked, of a woman at a rail crossing murdered, of a petite woman pushed to death under a subway car, of an innocent young man simply executed on the streets, of an ax-wielding-nut terrorizing the helpless, of subway monsters assaulting with impunity all whom they please. Walking up to a stranger, slugging him in the temple, inflicting brain damage, all that is now a sort of blood sport.

Drug stores and food minimarkets in big cities are either of two sorts: one, they have been looted and ransacked; or, two, in fear of that fate, they have put almost all their goods behind protective wire or glass, cut back their nocturnal and morning hours, multiplied their security cameras, and hired guards.

There is also a growing, but again muted sense that inner-city, black-on-black gangland killing is now moving to the suburbs. Such violence is beginning more to target random strangers, often solitary drivers, pedestrians, and joggers.

And the reaction?

Zilch, except for a periodic rant from Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, the Obamas, or the Biden racialists about “racism,” as if a projectionist, unsubstantiated, Mark Milley/Lloyd Austin-like charge of “white rage” will preempt any American from saying out loud what millions of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and whites know to be true: that about four percent of the population (black males from ages 12-30) are committing over 50 percent of the violent assaults, rapes, and murders—that are reported.

Second, the additional truth that we dare not speak is that this two-year-long, post-George Floyd rampage is entirely predicated on three simple subtexts:

One, the black leadership—an Al Sharpton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Louis Farrakhan, the Obamas, Oprah, LeBron James—who are so eager to talk of collectives, such as “whites” and “white people” as 230 million indistinguishable citizens who act as mindless racial automatons (as if George Soros, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Tucker Carlson by reason of their similar hue, can be predictably stereotyped) will never address this asymmetry. And if others do, they will seek to mute anyone by charges of racism! Do they have a duty to?

Only if in the past they have talked in collective terms about “blacks” and “whites” as monolithic groups. In that context, yes, if they have fashioned their careers as racial commentators, then they need to explain whether the black crime wave is important, irrelevant, so-so, due to racism, structural problems in the black community, government policies, etc.—anything that clarifies the striking asymmetrical crime statistics.

Two, the post-May 2020 climate of defunding the police, the new assertiveness of the Soros state and city attorneys, the culture of the lying Jussie Smollett, the smearing of the Covington kids, and the serial Duke pseudo-charges of racism, the prevalence of critical legal and critical race theories, the constant harangue of media elites on network news and cable television blaring out supposed pandemics of “white rage” and “white privilege,” and the utter racist screaming of prominent African American television talking heads from Ellie Mystal (“White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them.”), to Joy Reid (“In America, there’s a thing about both white vigilantism and white tears, particularly male, white tears. Really white tears in general, because that’s what Karens are, right? They can Karen-out and then as soon as they get caught, bring waterworks.”), to one of the many Pentagon diversity officers, to the current Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina—all have proverbially lowered the bar of acceptable racism.

That is, a young criminal correctly senses that if he commits a crime, he will likely not be arrested, if rarely arrested, not prosecuted, if even more rarely prosecuted, not convicted, and if even more rarely still convicted, not jailed, and if even more rarely again jailed, almost immediately released.

More disturbingly, the criminal also distills and digests the popular discourse—the media narratives, the professional sports rants, the message of hip-hop music, the wild charges of the progressive political industry, the pontifications of teachers and professors—and rightly concludes that somehow his violence is contextualized, if not seen as reparatory.

Killing a jogger, hijacking a young female’s car, or blowing out the brains of a random pedestrian is a sort of a comeuppance for “white privilege” and payback for “systemic racism” and retribution for “white rage.” Swarming the Wawa market, looting it, while a twerker does her performance art is not driven by poverty or racism but supposedly by a larger sense that it is permissible.

The more that privileged white and minority bicoastal elites lie that the country is utterly and perniciously racist, the more these protected aristocrats encourage a logical reparatory settling of scores.

This redirection of “black rage” is de facto aimed at the grandmother who ventures to the market, the lower-middle-class mom in a car with her daughter, the penniless white student, the Asian immigrant struggling to get to work, the Hispanic gas station worker, or the Hasidic Jewish mom with her stroller.

Three. The elite effort “to do something” does not entail moving into the inner city and setting up charter-school academies (cf. the Martha’s Vineyard mindset). It does not mean reintegrating the schools or firing criminally incompetent union teachers.

It does not mean a national campaign of reform from rappers, NBA superstars, and stand-up comedians all advising the fatherless to marry their children’s mother, to take on the responsibilities of the nuclear family, to serve as a model to whites, Asians, and Hispanics that blacks can offer superior instruction about the invaluable role of nuclear families and engaged fathers. Instead, it is to level 24/7 charges of racism, so that the wealthier and more privileged careers become, the more their trajectories are accelerated by charges of racism.