Hate Hoax History IV
Americans Believe Outrageous Lies About Racism in America
"Twenty-two percent of people who identified as “very liberal” said they thought the police shot at least ten thousand unarmed black men in a year. Among self-identified liberals, fully 40 percent thought the figure was between one thousand and ten thousand. The actual figure was somewhere around ten."
- Douglas Murray, page 27 of The War on the West
In The War on the West1, in discussing people’s impressions and beliefs about race relations between black people in America and the police (as if they are all white), Douglas Murray writes (pages 24-28)…
...there are those for whom the killing of George Floyd was not just something that happened in America but something that was emblematic of America. And this perspective, that what happened that day was not just the behavior of a rogue cop who was subsequently arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for his crime but rather than a pulling back of the curtain and revealing of something in the heart of all white Americans, was an interpretation that DiAngelo the critical race theorists, and others had primed Americans for. And primed college-aged Americans in particular. Polls showed that positive views on the state of race relations in America peaked at the time of President Obama's inauguration in 2009. At that time, a CBS/New York Times poll found that 66 percent of Americans thought that race relations were generally good.[16] But as it tracked the polls over the following years, the Associated Press noted that views on race "started to sour" in 2014.[17] One interpretation of this is that America became more racist over the two terms of its first black president. Another is that the media attention on certain incidents - whether justifiable or not - helped to alter America's view of itself.
What made this worse was that a generation of students brought up with elements of CRT had been persuaded that race relations in their country were wildly worse than they were. People in the American academy had invented and popularized a whole set of concepts and terms to help this along. Just as their colleagues in the intersectional arena insisted on the idea that everyone lived in the intersectional arena insisted on the idea that everyone lived in a "cis-heteronormative patriarchy," so the professors of CRT introduced a set of racialized terms into the academic language and from there into the nation's language. They argued, for instance, that America was not merely a white-dominated society, or that America had a white-majority population, but a "white supremacist" society. They claimed that all white people benefitted from allowing white-supremacist rule. They claimed that when confronted by their racism, white people deliberately changed the subject or made themselves into the victims. They claimed that there was a specific phenomenon known as "white tears" (and a subcategory within that, "white women's tears'').
They also claimed that whiteness was contagious. For how else to deal with the fact that many black people were not in 100 percent agreement with the new racial theorists and did not all agree with the new ideas being foisted on everyone? One answer was to claim that black people who were not in agreement that America was intrinsically racist society were enacting "whiteness," or otherwise imbibing it, like some terrible disease.[18] After 2020 US presidential election, the Washington Post even introduced its readers to the concept of “multiracial whiteness” as a way to explain how ethnic minorities might have voted for the Republican candidate.[19] In these settings, in which you could get black-white people, though not white-black people, it becomes clear that “black” and “white” had simply become synonyms for “good” and “bad.”
Advocates of this theory claimed that race was not just one lense through which to view society. They insisted that it was the most important, in fact, the only, lens through which to view society. And much of the venom and fury that exists today in America, and in the West as a whole, now comes down to this one specific problem: that people have been shown a version of their society that is exaggerated at best and wildly off at worst. Take just one, perhaps the most famous “racist” event of recent years - the storm that blew CRT and its theories across the whole Western world: the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
In the days, weeks, and months after that terrible event, there was barely an organ or an individual in America or the wider world that did not interpret the appalling video of that death through a single lens. That a white policeman was caught on camera killing a black man and that this was a racist killing. Not content with that explanation, everything about this interpretation was then extrapolated outward. This was not just an individual racist killing. It was a racist killing that told us about the nature of racist policing in America. From there, it went out again. We learned that this racist policing was just one aspect of a wider racist society. And from there that not just America but all white-dominated societies (and societies in which white people simply had a presence) were somehow revealed in that moment. The interpretation that was popularized across the globe was that what happened to George Floyd told us about a routine injustice It claimed that black lives were able to be stolen with impunity in modern America and that this was because America, and the wider West, was institutionally racist, white supremacist, and otherwise guilty of a no-longer-avoidable bigotry.
Actual public understanding of the issue turned out to be wildly, provably out of sync with reality. For instance, when US citizens were polled and asked how many unarmed black Americans they believed had been shot by police in 2019, the numbers were off by several orders of magnitude.
Twenty-two percent of people who identified as “very liberal” said they thought the police shot at least ten thousand unarmed black men in a year. Among self-identified liberals, fully 40 percent thought the figure was between one thousand and ten thousand. The actual figure was somewhere around ten.[20]
By proportion of the population, unarmed black Americans were slightly more likely to be shot by the police than unarmed white Americans. But as figures compiled by the Washington Post Police Shootings database confirm, in the years before the death of George Floyd, more police officers were killed by black Americans than unarmed black Americans were killed by the police.[21]
Almost none of this cut through. But the polls seemed to suggest that increased reporting on this issue in the 2010s may have had the inadvertent effect of causing Americans to imagine that the problem of deadly interactions between unarmed black men and the police was exponentially worse than before. Whatever the realities of race in America, a group of divisive activists were ready for this moment, with their pre-prepared theories, phrases, claims, and demands about eradicating hidden racism. And they got very busy indeed.
That was why sporting teams across the world began to “take the knee” before every match. They were inveigled into thinking they had to do so to demonstrate that they were against racist killing, that black people were freely killed by policemen, and that they should not be. That is why politicians across the West took the knee and gave speeches against racism. It is why Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the leadership of the Democrat Party wore African kente cloth scarves and kneeled for eight minutes forty-six seconds before being winched back up again by their attendants. It is why the idea of “educating yourself” if you were white suddenly entered the popular lexicon. It is why CEOs such as the editor in chief of National Geographic started to put under their name and title as a sign-off “Race Card: White, privileged, with much to learn.”[22]
It was a moment when silence in the face of “racism” was deemed to be violence. A moment when actual violence was excused as a form of legitimate political speech. A moment an academic could blithely declare that “the state of black America as a whole is probably worse than it was fifty years ago.”[23] It was at this moment, in the days after Floyd’s death, that concepts such as “white privilege” spilt out from the fringes of academia, where they had been incubated, and flooded through every part of society.
So it is worth pointing out a potentially unpopular but nevertheless crucial fact about this origin story. Which is that there is still no evidence that the killing of George Floyd was a racist murder. At the trial of Derek Chauvin, no evidence was produced to suggest that it was a racist murder. Of there had been any such evidence - that Chauvin harbored deep animus against black Americans and set out that May morning hoping to murder a black person - then the prosecution chose to make no such evidence available at Chauvin’s trial. In fact, there is good evidence to suggest that no racial element existed at all.
Murray then goes on to describe the case of Tony Timpa who was killed in a situation very similar to that of George Floyd. His point in bringing this up is to make the point that unlike with Floyd, with Timpa, the nation did not freak out and sacrifice an innocent man to their irrationality and malice because it was not made into a racial issue. Murray continues on pages 29-36,
The reason that I mention this is not to diminish what happened to Floyd, any more than it is to diminish what happened to Timpa. The reason is to point out that these two cases are very similar and that in neither case was a racial motive proved. Nor is it to say that there never has been any racism in America or that there is no residual racism anywhere in the Western world. But it is to point out that the killing of George Floyd has been interpreted as commonplace in American society when it is by any measure an anomaly in America. Still, it is insisted that in this anomaly, the true nature of America can be discerned. It is an extension of the old left-wing idea that if you only provoked the police a little, they would reveal the true face of the democratic state and that its face would be fascist. Today there is a widespread belief that if you pull back the mask of the American state, you have a state that is not just racist but white supremacist and that its agents and representatives, as well as the citizenry as a whole, are dedicated to the casual murder of black people.
That is why even more than a year since the death of George Floyd, athletes continue to take the knee before sporting games. It is why football teams around the world continue to think it worth risking the growing irritation of their fans by kneeling before games. It is because Floyd’s death is believed to have revealed something. But if the killing is to be interpreted in this way, then we would need to be absolutely certain that this fons et origo - the foundational story - that we are telling ourselves about American society and the West as a whole is accurate.
And it is not. What is proved is that by 2020 America was ready and primed for a certain interpretation of itself to burst out. That interpretation had been prepared in the academy. It had been popularized in the media. And in record time, it had been given into by corporate entities, civil society organizations, and nowhere so much as in the campuses of the United States. We know this because long before 2020, American campuses had been undergoing a set of moral panics that future historians will look on with deep puzzlement. American students had been primed for a white-supremacist, racist interpretation of their own society to grip them. How do we know?
Because for a decade or more, they had been seeing ghouls and monsters that were not there.
MORAL PANICS
In april 2016, an extraordinary panic kicked off at the University of Indiana. It was at around nine o’clock in the evening that somebody reported that a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had been spotted on the campus at Bloomington. Social media lit up. “Students be careful,” one student wrote, “there’s someone walking around in KKK gear with a whip.” Others immediately criticized the college authorities. One student wrote, “There’s a man walking around campus in a KKK hood carrying a whip, and there’s NOTHING you can do to make students feel safe?” Students and their supervisors spread messages of support. “Please PLEASE PLEASE be careful out there tonight,” said one. “Always be with someone and if you have no dire reason to be out of the building I would recommend staying indoors if you’re alone.” The panic only subsided when it was discovered that the suspected member of the KKK was, in fact, a Dominican monk, wearing the traditional white robes of his order. The “whip” he was said to have been carrying in his hands turned out to be a rosary. Despite these facts becoming clear, not all of the students stood down graciously. “OK seriously,” asked one. “Why the fuck was a priest walking around campus tonight?”[24]
It might have been easy to laugh off this panic at the University of Indiana if it had been the only such incident. But it was not. Over the last decade, multiple universities across the United States had similar panics. For example, one morning in 2013, there was a sighting of a person in a Klansman outfit at Oberlin College in Ohio. The panic at this liberal arts college led to the cancellation of all classes for the rest of the day. The police were called to chase the Klansman off the premises. But when the police arrived to investigate the sighting, they found no members of the KKK. It transpired that the sighting was most likely caused by either a homeless pedestrian wrapped in a blanket or a woman who was seen the same morning carrying a blanket across the campus.[25]
In November 2015, a queer black activist who was also a former student-body president caused a virtual stampede at the University of Missouri when he claimed that the KKK had been spotted on campus. “Students take precaution,” he warned on social media. “Stay away from the window in residence halls. The KKK has been confirmed to be sighted on campus. I’m working with the MUPD [campus security], the state trooper and the national guard.” In fact, the only force he was working with was his own imagination. Nobody needed to keep away from any windows. The student eventually apologized for sharing “misinformation.”[26] Other panics followed a similar trend. In June 2017, the University of Maryland’s police department was called after an alleged “noose” was spotted under a tree on campus. The police inspecting the scene discovered that the “noose” was nothing but a knotted piece of white plastic lying on the floor. Though they looked into any possible “hate crime bias,” the police concluded that the material was of the kind used “to contain and protect loose items during transport.” Still, many students at the university were dissatisfied with the conclusion and posted images of the piece of white plastic on social media inviting their fellow students to “make their own conclusions.” One complained that “they [the police] didn’t even try to entertain me and my friend by acknowledging the possibility that this was a symbol of hate. They were very adamant.”[27] As well they might have been in the circumstances, being called out to investigate a refuse sack tie.
A few months later, in October, it was the turn of the Michigan State University to have a noose sighting. There a student claimed to have come out of her dorm room and been confronted by a hanging noose. Condemnations for this hate incident came swiftly from everyone on campus from fellow students all the way up to the university’s president. Their condemnations and commiserations continued until it transpired that the “noose” was one half of a pair of shoelaces that had been lost and hung up by the person who found them so that they could be reclaimed by their owner.[28]
In March 2018, it was the turn of Vincennes University, where a student claimed that he had been approached by a man in a white head covering who was brandishing a gun and hurling racial slurs. The campus authorities swiftly sent out a warning to the whole Vincennes community. The dean of students issued a statement saying, “Vincennes University is totally dedicated to respect, diversity, and inclusion. We take such reports very seriously and ongoing investigation is of the highest priority.” The subsequent police investigation used CCTV to discover that the incident never happened.[29]
If these sorts of panics had been confined to campuses in the United States, then they might have been easily dismissed as a problem of overprivileged, overcredentialed youth. But in recent years, they began to happen among adults too, including among adults with some of the highest visibility of anyone in the country…
…In September 2019, the restaurant of a former NFL player, Edawn Louis Coughman, was vandalized with racist graffiti and swastikas. Coughman called his insurance company to report the incident, but the police were too quick, and when they caught up with him, they found him with the black paint that it turned out he had used to carry out the "racist attack" on himself.[31] And then, of course, there were the freezing hours of a January night in 2019 when the actor Jussie Smollett claimed that he had been set upon outside a branch of Subway by two white men shouting racist and homophobic slurs. He claimed that they physically attacked him, put a noose around his neck, and covered him in an unknown substance, an incident throughout which he allegedly held on to his Subway sandwich. Reaction from the highest quarters in the country was swift and credulous. Senator Kamala Harris, who turned out to know Smollett, was among those who described what had happened as "an attempted modern day lynching."[32] Smollett stuck to his story in the days afterward, occasionally adding extras. At a singing performance a week later, he told his sympathetic and supportive audience that he had fought back against his attackers and would not allow them to win because he, Jussie Smollett, stood for love. But as the story fell apart, so did much of the public support for him. Nothing about the story stood up. And as the CCTV footage started to be scanned, police got the opportunity to catch up with the white supremacists who carried out the attack. They were Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, two large weight-lifting brothers from Nigeria, who turned out to be known to Smollett. It became apparent that Smollett believed that a successful claim of a hate crime against himself would give him leverage to negotiate a pay raise on the show Empire, in which he felt he was undervalued. So the Osundairo brothers were drafted in to beat him around a bit.
The question of what was, or was not, going through Smollett's mind at this time is certainly interesting. But what is far more interesting is the eagerness with which his story was believed. It wasn't just Harris but dozens and dozens of prominent Americans, from Nancy Pelosi to Stephen Colbert, who took Smollett’s story at face value. Indeed on his next evening show, Colbert invited a sandpaper-voiced actress called Ellen Page on to sermonize about the Smollett incident and what it meant. This was when some doubt had already been cast over Smollett’s story, and this was unforgivable in Page's eyes. "We have a media that's saying it's a debate whether or not what just happened to Jussie Smollett is a hate crime," she said. "It's absurd," she added, thumping one fist into the other for emphasis. "There [bleep] isn't a debate." At which the studio audience whooped and shouted, "Yeah!" "Sorry I'm like I'm really fired up tonight," she said, as if she was apologetic. "Not at all," agreed Colbert: "You have to be fired up. You have to be fired up." "It feels impossible to not feel this way right now," Page added to more whoops and applause.[33]
None of this is to say that racism does not occur and that racial violence is unheard of in America or anywhere else. Yet these cases, and many others that could be cited, do not suggest a population with a healthy perspective on the risk and likelihood of racist incidents. There seems, in fact, to be a perception - honestly held or otherwise - of a type of racism that if it still exists, does so at the furthest margins of society. Americans over the last decade have not lived in a country where Klansmen prowl the land - always interestingly alone. And they certainly have not lived in a country in which members of the KKK can routinely be found strolling around the nation's campuses. They do not live in a country in which lynchings are a feature of everyday life. They actually live in one in which there is such a dearth of white supremacists that weight-lifting Nigerians occasionally need to be flown in to take on the role. What appears to have happened is that a picture of America has formed in the heads of certain Americans. A picture set and struck at some time around the early part of the last century. An America in which the KKK roamed the land and Hollywood actresses deserved applause for daring to stand up to "attempted lynchings."
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
How did this happen? One possibility is to see that the state of race relations in the United States resemble the effect created by a projecting device. The details of the image being projected matter enormously - indeed, matter more than anything else. One explanation for America's savage but intense dissection of every killing of a black American at the hands of the police, for example, is that America needs to fight over the precise nature of these details. Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, and other cases ring in the public mind because most minute details are being wrestled over. At one end, there are people who would like to claim that these and other deaths of black people at police hands are a demonstration of the true face of a white-supremacist, institutionally racist nation. At various other ends are people pleading that these are the sort of incidents that are inevitable when a heavily armed citizenry and a heavily armed police force try to negotiate their way through millions of annual interactions. The details are worth fighting over, bitterly if need be. Because if Michael Brown was shot with his hands in the air and posed no threat to the arresting officers, then that could well point to a very serious problem in a nation. But if he was not shot with his hands in the air and the riots that resulted from his death were whipped up for no reason, then some dishonest actors have a lot of accounting for their own actions to do.
The details are fought over because America is the world's most powerful nation, the world's most influential nation and the nation whose sins and errors are likely to be exported just as much as are its virtues and attainments. And just as America watches what is projected onto the wall, so the world watches too, with less attention to the details, but with just as great an interest in what ends up being projected on the wall of the world. The size of the protests in Berlin, London, Brussels, Stockholm, and many other major cities in the days after George Floyd's death suggested one thing in particular. That people felt they had to come out because they had to voice their outrage at the world's most powerful and influential country deeming the lives of its black citizens so cheaply that it allows its police officers to strangle them with impunity in broad daylight. Protesters around the world responded to an image that they see projected of America. A picture in which a whole catalogue of subtle mistakes, manipulations, and distortions had been infinitely magnified. But the distortion comes from America and is projected from America, by America.
Be sure to see... Hate Hoax History I - The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion Hate Hoax History II - The Tawana Brawly & Al Sharpton Hate Crime Hoax Hate Hoax History III - "Skinheads" and Backward Swastikas Hate Hoax History IV - Americans Believe Outrageous Lies About Racism in America Hate Hoax History V - When Sarah Silverman Lost Her Sense of Humor ...and subscribe to get future episodes and more! Thanks for reading! Please see my other reports, my videos, and consider donating.
Liberty my right ∴ Truth my sword
Laughter my shield ∴ Knowledge my steed
Love my solace ∴ Honor my rewardBroadside Books, 2022