In his latest Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley balks (free link) at the Biden Administration’s handling of the centenary of the Tulsa race riots of 1921:
The political left is much more interested in black suffering than in black accomplishment, but black history is about more than victimization at the hands of whites. It’s also about what blacks have achieved notwithstanding that victimization. And in the first half of the 20th century, long before an expanded welfare state supposedly came to the rescue, blacks accomplished quite a lot. Incomes rose, poverty fell dramatically, and education gaps narrowed. Blacks entered the skilled professions—medicine, law, accounting, engineering, social work—at faster rates in the years preceding the 1960s civil-rights legislation than they did in the years afterward. Among racial and ethnic groups rising from similar circumstances, historians have described the rapidity of these gains as unprecedented.
Black Tulsa residents of a century ago would also be shocked to learn that it is no longer racist white vigilantes but black criminals who pose the bigger threat to safety in black communities. Liberals blame today’s disproportionately high black criminality on the “legacy†of slavery and Jim Crow. But violent crime among blacks declined in the 1940s, then dropped even further in the 1950s, while remaining relatively stable among whites. In other words, blacks living during Jim Crow segregation, and much closer to the era of slavery, experienced significantly lower rates of violent crime and incarceration both in absolute terms and relative to whites.
More black people have been murdered year-to-date in Chicago than were killed in the Tulsa riots of a century ago.
He proposes that they’re embracing the notion of catharsis:
The left’s focus on the past behavior of whites, while ignoring the present behavior of blacks, might offer some people catharsis, and it might help groups like the NAACP or Black Lives Matter stay relevant. But where is the evidence that such an approach facilitates black upward mobility?
The theory was first enunciated by Aristotle (in relation to drama) and I don’t believe it’s psychologically sound or at best while catharsis may provide relief for some for others it’s a way of dwelling on real or imagined injuries. That is the nature of radicalization. Once you have been radicalized with respect to race it becomes a Theory of Everything.
