Back in the Summer of 2020

The seizure seemed to last forever

Congress kneels for Black Lives Matter (Wikimedia Commns)

My title – obvious to anyone who knows their Rock anthems – is a borrow from the brilliant Bryan Adams song Summer of '69. But brilliant is absolutely the last word that would spring to mind to describe the events that took place in Minneapolis and elsewhere four years ago in the summer of 2020 – unless perhaps for the looters who came away loaded with the contents of their local shops. We are talking of course of the protests/riots that spread from the American Midwest right across the Western world in those summer months; events which will be etched into the memory of any sentient being, anywhere on the planet, with access to any kind of mass media device.

The essay that follows is the first part of a long one that I originally wrote in the immediate aftermath of those events. It was my contribution to a proposed book on the George Floyd phenomenon. But in the event, the book’s editor was unable to find a publisher brave enough to commission anything that did not kneel down before the Systemic Racism narrative. *

from a Target store on Lake Street in Minneapoli (Wikimedia Commons)

The Victim’s Progress (Part 1)

In all societies and throughout history there have been oppressed minorities – (as well of course as individuals demonised for their physical and/or psychological characteristics). The post-Enlightenment West is no exception. Black people in today’s America will have family histories - of grandparents and great- grandparents who would have experienced something of this. Looking down its nose at black people was a significant blot on white Eurocentric history. The pervasive Systemic Racism narrative, however, that has grown from it needs to be viewed in a broader context....but rarely is.

Racial animosity has taken many forms down the ages, as anyone with an appetite for delving into history will know. One Long Story of Aggressors & Victims is one among various possible broad-brush perspectives on history...almost as gnomic perhaps as One Damn Thing after Another. Or perhaps One Great School Yard where male and female; young and old; black, white, brown and yellow played.... nicely sometimes but other times not. One of the best things though that can be said of our Western Christian heritage is that it taught us - unlike our own Pagan past and most of human history - to morally interrogate the bullying tendencies within our human nature. Our Christian heritage taught us that we should cherish the victim as well as the victor. During the 20^th century, that Christian heritage segued into a quasi-religion of ‘Social Justice’. This might seem fine in theory but I often find myself thinking: “pity the poor souls who, lacking designated victim-group status themselves, are wide open to being bullied or terrorised by those with it.”  

During the second half of the 20^th century, this new Social Justice moral framing conceived a pyramid of victimhood with black African ethnicity right at the top of it. And amongst the bien pensant Progressives who dominate the media mainstream – and so get to tell us our collective stories – black ethnicity became so sanctified that its ‘victims’ came to be deemed virtually incapable of doing wrong.

There can rarely have been a story more starkly at odds with easily discoverable fact

There can rarely have been a story more starkly at odds with easily  discoverable  fact  than the imaginary plight of large numbers of black men in the 21^st century USA living in fear of violence and oppression at the hands of their white fellow Americans. Any fair-minded narration of events of the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd whilst being arrested by a Minneapolis police officer, would have been a very different telling than the one that gushed hysterically from the Western world’s mainstream media. It would – after acknowledging that the actions of the officer did indeed warrant urgent investigation - have moved on to also acknowledge that the incidence of black men dying at the hands of police  in the USA is dwarfed by the problem of them dying at the hands of other black men. And as protests erupted in cities across America and beyond, the plot would have thickened when it turned out that this protest regularly found expression in the looting and vandalising of nearby black and Asian neighbourhood businesses. There would have been flashbacks to similar mayhem in the recent past in Ferguson, Missouri, in Baltimore, Milwaukee and North Carolina. And as the summer wore on, journalists and tv crews would have started to pick up on the sharp upsurge  of black-on-black violence in the most crime ridden neighbourhoods as shamed and demoralised city police departments backed off from attempting to maintain order.

the upsurge of black-on-black violence as demoralised city police departments backed off from attempting to maintain order.

Eventually a constructive national conversation might then have begun on the question of whether ‘Systemic Racism’ really exists in today’s America. The angry charge of white racism (ironically emanating more from young middle class whites than from black people themselves) would have sparked a vigorous media interrogation. But this was not to be. In its stead we got an impassioned psychodrama playing out on a vast scale on the major news and commentary networks all across the Western world. The setting of the drama was a fictitious land whose white inhabitants find ways to increase their sense of their own worth by devaluing - both consciously and unconsciously - the worth of their black fellow citizens. The psychodrama involved much shouting and moralising as well as violence and rioting. But these latter aspects were euphemised as a ‘mainly peaceful’ moral crusade; one that was utterly necessary if these putatively self-satisfied white people were ever to be made to understand that Black Lives Matter.

(Wikimedia Commons)

In the months following the George Floyd riots – egged on by a hyperbolic media-fest - the caving in by elite institutions across the West to shrill Systemic Racism accusations became an orgy of moral cowardice. The self-flagellation of The System reached its apogee in the embarrassing spectacle of police officers  ‘taking the knee’ to unruly and threatening (and racist) ‘anti-racist’ mobs.  It is hard to come up with another less pejorative term than toadying for such behaviour. In the UK, for example, parliamentary MPs were required to undergo ‘Unconscious Bias’ training sessions. That such a patronising (and tax-payer-fleecing) training programme came to be instituted illustrates just how unequal common sense is when up against the white Western intelligentsia’s racial guilt complex.

(Wikimedia Commons)

served to obscure the story of millions of black people living prosperous and successful lives in a country of which they are proud.

Doubtless all this was therapeutic for its virtue-signalling participants on the streets and in the newsrooms. But it also had elements of tragedy. Perhaps the greatest of these is how it served to obscure the story of millions of black people in 21^st century America and elsewhere, living prosperous and successful lives in a country of which they are proud. Most black Americans are neither victims nor perpetrators of violence. The stereotyping of them as oppressed victims – particularly in European eyes – is one of the more dismal by-products of Western liberalism’s 21^st century moral confusion. The charge of Systemic Racism is easy to correct by recourse to copious and readily available statistics but what seems nigh on impossible to correct is the pervasive will to believe that has rendered it one of the central myths of our era.

Anyone really wanting to get at some truth on the subject of violent crime perpetrated against black people in America can – with just a modicum of effort – access reliable crime statistics  showing that the per capita incidence of white-on-black violence is less than (not more than) black-on-white violence. In fact inter-racial violence is much rarer than intra-racial violence generally. The truly unconscionable threat faced disproportionately by black Americans, in certain dysfunctional inner city areas, is the one that comes from being caught up – whether willingly or not - in the violent underclass world of their neighbours. This is a netherworld in which countless black lives are ruined. But it is a world which, for most middle class liberals, exists only as a remote abstraction. For its actual inhabitants though it is a self-perpetuating virtual warzone of mainly juvenile rival gangs acting out their own grim Godfather remake of competitive knife and gun crime. This violent, drug-fuelled netherworld is not a uniquely black one but, in American cities, black youths make up a disproportionate part of it.

Worse still is the violence resulting from a certain ugly kind of machismo that - again not by any mean a uniquely black phenomenon - is particularly rife amongst members of the black underclass; one that romanticises (if that is not a too perverse a use of the term) a version of masculinity that thinks of its young womenfolk as ‘bitches’ to be impregnated and then discarded leaving a trail of dire consequences for the raising of children. Bizarrely, in the thuggish, misogynistic lyrics of rap ‘music’, a version of this masculinity is lapped up by adoring white college kids as some kind of radical chic.

these ‘Systemically Racist’ lands of North America and Western Europe is a story abounding in paradox.

The story of these ‘Systemically Racist’ lands of North America and Western Europe is a story abounding in paradox. Black-on-black violence of all kinds has invariably increased dramatically in the wake of the (white dominated) anti-police protests that have punctuated American life in recent decades. Nobody seems minded to protest about this. Middle class Progressives and student radicals do not surge into these nightmare neighbourhoods waving banners, calling for justice for the innocents caught in the crossfire and an end to a culture of sexual oppression. These black lives do not seem to matters to them. Another paradox: why do people flock lemming-like from all over the world to these lands of alleged hard-wired disadvantage and arbitrary police beatings?

But wind the clock back seventy years or so and the Black Lives Matter narrative would have been a substantially correct one. It is probably fair to say that, until the 1960s, a majority of white Europeans and Americans would – and without feeling any need to give it much thought – think of black African ethnicity as inherently inferior. One could call this a time of systemic racism. And within American society in those days, a much, much smaller subset seethed with a racial vitriol that would make of this supposed inferiority a justification for their malignant desire to persecute and subdue. A less often told story though - given the inbuilt conflict dramatising tendencies of media narratives - is the racial harmony and goodwill that also existed in pre-civil rights America alongside - and in contrast to - the Jim Crow mentality. One has only to look at footage of adoring white fans of the Swing bands of the 1930s to get a glimpse of this now air-brushed counter-narrative.  Fair-minded people will nevertheless mostly be in agreement that there was some cause for grievance. Progressives typically view the 1960s Civil Rights movement as 100% beneficial. And 21^st c. white liberal knee-taking ethno-masochism? They might see this as a necessary corrective - on a socio-psychological time lag – for past collective guilt.

But there are compelling arguments that this rosy view of post-Civil Rights is a wrong one. The radical individualism that reached a critical mass in the 1960s – and of which the Civil Rights movement was a major part - may have been liberating for some but it had huge downsides for others. One of the biggest has been the collapse and atomisation - in inner cities across the Western world - of nuclear family structures. This has been most pronounced in demographically small but hugely problematic ‘sink' neighbourhoods - left-behind remnants of an older working class. Post-60s leftist social commentary has been obtuse about these downsides; seeing in them merely an argument for yet more unravelling of traditional social mores.

progressively unmooring those in the underclass from the societal glue of family ties.

Documenting the consequences of that unravelling has been confined to an esoteric conservative counter-culture. In an American context, Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare (1993), describes, with copious statistics, how the breaking free from 1950s ‘conformity’ that seemed so liberating to middle class youth, created another kind of conformity and one that has been particularly toxic to the least sophisticated. How it has been progressively unmooring those in the underclass from the societal glue of family ties. How it has negated realistic adult aspirations and replaced them with a nihilistic kind of permanent adolescence; confused, bent on instant gratification and constantly disaffected. The irony was not lost on eminent Harlem born social theorist Thomas Sowell: “If [Progressives] could just stop making things worse it would be an enormously greater contribution than they’re likely to make any other way.” 

But these knock on effects of 1960s ‘liberations’ – and the conservative counter-cultural analysis of them - is a huge subject so I’ll leave it there. It will be one for a future essay.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Postscript

In the wake of the George Floyd media storm, the Black Lives Matter Global Network was in receipt of huge donations but in 2022 allegations of financial irregularity began to surface in various publications including this one about a “backlash  for what some have seen as a misuse of funds on various lavish purchases and 'consulting' fees”.

“the ensuing riots would likely have made the conflagrations of 2020 look like a Girl Scout campfire”

In April 2021 the officer whose actions caused the death of George Floyd was convicted of the 2^nd degree murder. The trial took place amid an atmosphere of mob justice captured in this piece by Heather Mac Donald: “Had the jury failed to convict Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin on all three counts of murder and manslaughter, the ensuing riots would likely have made the conflagrations of 2020 look like a Girl Scout campfire..... The Chauvin jury may have pondered not just the destruction of American cities following any acquittal but its own safety. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune had published profiles of jury members minus their names on Monday, during closing arguments in the trial.”

Note * this essay was originally written for print and so web links have been added retroactively. Had I done this at the time of writing they would probably have been better ones.