Futile Gestures

There's an old saying in engineering:  Before you can solve a problem, you must understand it. As we watch the nation's top corporations, universities and media attempt to eradicate "systemic racism," we see a classic example of refusing to fully understand and state a problem followed by a panicked attempt to develop "solutions" anyway. The consequence is a massive effort to come up with futile gestures that somehow demonstrate the "wokeness" of those institutions. 

Heather McDonald comments:

The lethal arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May triggered widespread riots and a torrent of contempt for America from virtually every institution in the country. Businesses large and small, the education establishment, and the press rushed to condemn the country’s purportedly endemic racism, implicitly accusing the majority of Americans of destroying “black lives.” Banks and law firms pledged that hiring and promotions would now be even more race-conscious than before. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured forth from corporate coffers into activist groups; the corporate benefactors hoped to dismantle America’s white supremacy, they announced ...

Fealty to “diversity” and denunciations of white privilege have been a unifying theme in academia for decades, of course. What’s different this time is the sheer venom of the denunciations. College presidents and deans competed for the most sweeping indictment of the American polity, rooted in the claim that blacks are everywhere and at all times under threat.

Concern about racial inequity is certainly justified, but the attempted "solutions"  will not be effective because political correctness—now bolstered by a "cancel culture"—will dissuade serious people from even discussing the underlying characteristics of the problem. And then, there's the politics of race, allowing some racial groups to be used as political weapons.

The argument that our nation is "systemically racist" is one that encourages certain racial groups to view themselves as victims. It also encourages at least some white people to view themselves as "privileged" at best and more commonly as "oppressors." It's the language of critical race theory, a dishonest trope that resonates on the Left.

McDonald is fearless when she asks the verboten questions that are absolutely necessary to answer if we are to develop meaningful solutions to the racial problems we face as a society:

What if the racism explanation for ongoing disparities is wrong, however? What if racial economic and incarceration gaps cannot close without addressing personal responsibility and family culture—without a sea change in the attitudes that many inner-city black children bring with them to school regarding studying, paying attention in class, and respecting teachers, for example? What if the breakdown of the family is producing children with too little capacity to control their impulses and defer gratification? 

It is much easier not to ask these questions, because if they are asked, the actual solutions that would be implied are daunting. Among the Left, it's far more palatable to virtue signal (with layers of "diversity training" and heartfelt TV commercials that say all the right stuff) and create "solutions" that are nothing more than futile gestures to solve a problem that is very complex.

ADDENDUM:

In an in-depth look at the origins of the 1960s riots that roiled America and today's rioting across many U.S. cities,  Katherine Gorka (read the whole thing) provides significant evidence that the perpetrators of rioting in both eras were organized leftist organizations. In both cases, these organizations took advantage of racial incidents (usually involving the police) to foment unrest and then violence. In both cases, the leftists were primarily white, college-educated radicals who used racism as a catalyst for their dream of revolution. 

In the 1960s, the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) along with their militant arm, The Weather Underground, and the Black Panthers and related groups were hard-left. They were trained to transform protests into riots, had written manuals that guided their adherents, and cared little that their rioting hurt, not helped, the black community. 

Today, groups like antifa and BLM are hard left and committed to revolution using a marxist ideology. Some of their senior leaders have connections back to the 60s groups. They are professional agitators and would-be revolutionaries. They, like their brethren of 60 years ago, care little for the black community, except to use it as an excuse for revolution.

Gorka writes:

Not only are there strong parallels between the riots of 2020 and the riots of the 1960s, but there is a direct link between the organizers. As Gonzalez points out, one of the three BLM founders, Patrice Cullors, spent a decade working as a radical organizer in the Labor/Community Strategy Center, which was established and run by Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground.

They bombed the State Department, the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the California attorney general’s office, and a New York City police station.

The Weather Underground was formed in 1969 as a militant wing of the Students for a Democratic Society. They sought “the destruction of U.S. imperialism and [to] form a classless communist world.” In seeking those ends, they bombed the State Department, the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the California attorney general’s office, and a New York City police station.

Andrew McCarthy recently documented ties between the BLM Global Network and the Weather Underground. Kyle Shideler has also exposed the ideological roots of BLM’s obsession with white privilege, which can be traced directly to the terrorists of the Weather Underground.

As the United States now finally embarks on a serious effort to uncover whether, as Rand Paul charges, the current rioting is planned and organized, they would do well to rediscover the ground-breaking work of [Eugene] Methvin. He exposed the very real injustices faced by black Americans, but he also exposed the way those injustices were exploited by those who had been seduced by the lies of Marxist utopia.

Through painstaking research, Methven was able to uncover exactly how those radical organizers turned despair and frustration into violence. We can also now see, with the benefit of hindsight, that the social demolition of the revolutionaries only hurt those it aspired to help.

But for the leftists, that's just collateral damage in their effort to foment a revolution that will lead to their fantasy of a socialist utopia. In the 1960s, Democrats rightly condemned the actions of the hard-left almost without reservation. Today, the new Democrats, their presidential candidate and their trained hamsters in the media do everything possible to avoid naming the revolutionaries, describing their actual intent, and uncovering the source of their funding.*

In a very real way, the new Democrats are the silent allies of this generation's version of The Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. 

Voters will decide whether their alliance is good or bad for the country.

FOOTNOTE:

*  It appears that internal polling conducted by the Dems has indicated that they are on the wrong side of this issue. Dem leaders are now "condemning" rioting in strong terms, but still refuse to say "antifa" or "BLM" and insist that the riots are equality distributed among adherents to the Left and the Right—an outright lie. Unfortunately for them, they're about 4 months too late.