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As America Burns, the Left’s Racial Resentment Is Exposed

As America burns, millions of people are asking: why?

The proximate cause is known to everyone. No civilized person denies that the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was a horrific injustice. But in spite of unanimous consent on this matter, America has turned into a powder keg.

The truth is, the “protests” aren’t about Floyd. They never really were. America is living through a violent insurrection that has been driven by racial resentment towards white people.

Whenever a racially charged incident like this occurs, the event very quickly ceases to be about the killing itself and becomes contextualized into a grand conspiracy narrative that makes America, as a whole, culpable in racial terrorism. It’s a story that has been told a million times: America, according to our moral betters, is a land of hooded Klansmen and cross-burners, in which white racists commit violence against blacks with impunity on a daily basis. Fundamentally, nothing has changed since Reconstruction, according to this neat story.

But you can tell, just by watching TV, that none of this is actually true. Would government officials in a racist country let black and white radicals burn cities to the ground, in the name of anti-racism? In a racist country, would Hollywood, and the mainstream media, and politicians and pundits on the Left and Right, indulge rioting and arson as a form of “expression?”

Nevertheless, the conspiracy narrative is the “official story,” and powerful people remind Americans over and over again to never forget it, in spite of all evidence. They’re saying it louder than ever, it seems.

As a matter of fact, America has never been more multiracial, more diverse, more politically correct, or less white, frankly, than today. America in 2020 considers bigotry the gravest of all crimes: Americans have never been more sensitive to the feelings of the “protected classes,” and those who lack the sincere tolerance to get along understand that there are ruinous consequences for failure to censor prejudiced thoughts, consequences that are borne unequally by “oppressor” and “victim.” 

Meanwhile, white supremacist groups have never been more marginal, irrelevant, or powerless. There has never been a time when “white supremacist” could be more ridiculous a description for America and its political system.

It is not white racism, but something else, that is ascendant in America today. Here’s Van Jones’ take on what the Floyd riots are really all about:

It’s not the racist white person who is in the Ku Klux Klan that we have to worry about. It’s the white liberal Hillary Clinton supporter walking her dog in Central Park who would tell you right now, you know, people like that, ‘I don’t see race, race is no big deal to me, I see us all as the same, I give to charities,’ but the minute she sees a black man who she does not respect or who she has a slight thought against, she weaponized race like she had been trained by the Aryan nation. A Klansmember could not have been better trained to pick up her phone and tell the police a black man, African-American man, come get him. (Emphasis added.)

Even the “most liberal well-intentioned white person has a virus in his or her brain that can be activated at an instant,” he said.

Aspersions to the contrary, America today is a country that pretty much treats white Americans like there is something inherently wrong with them. They are a problem. Like the majority of Americans of every group, most white Americans are not bigots. But in spite of their best efforts to be fair, tolerant, and follow the ever-evolving dictates of political correctness, they have been branded racists anyway, just for existing.

Of course racism is a problem, and some white Americans do commit racially motivated violence. But crimes inspired by racism are not limited to whites. Prejudice is human, and every person and group of people is naturally predisposed to feel most at home among others like them. 

For the most part, Americans can control those instincts and treat others decently. That’s part of what it means to be an American, after all. But sometimes, some do not. No race has a monopoly on racism or racial violence, however, and it would be wrong to blame every white person for the actions of a white man who kills a black person, just as it would be wrong to blame every black person when a black person kills a white person. As far as the Left and media are concerned, however, it is only the first kind of crime that matters.

Whites, and all those who are not part of a politically “protected” group, carry a presumption of guilt with them that makes any adversity or violence they may face at the hands of someone in a protected group trivial. 

On the other hand, even pandemic shutdowns will be put on hold for the “protected” groups. As Leftist domestic terrorists are given free rein to destroy America’s cities, a general rule has been observed that the law cannot be enforced because the anger of a protected class takes precedence over the rule of law. “Law and order” is now racist; violent insurrection is now justice. This response can only be described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations” on steroids.

Is this so surprising, though, in a nation whose leading newspaper has adopted the mission of teaching the next generation of students that America was founded, not on freedom, but slavery and genocide?

The young black and white malcontents who are destroying America’s cities are driven by a powerful, collective resentment against white Americans that is borne out of a belief, spread by academics for decades, that white terrorism is at the heart of America’s identity and social structure. White Americans collectively are said to be responsible for some kind of ancient crime, and the debt that crime incurred has not yet been paid.

Those culpable for Floyd’s death are not just the cops in Minneapolis, then, but all cops and all white Americans, who are culpable for slavery also, and the decades of racial violence that followed the Civil War. All white Americans, we are ceaselessly told, knowingly or not, participate in a system of social repression from which they benefit, and are therefore enemies of justice.

For the most part, the subtext of the riots and those justifying them is as simple as this: the violence is actually the fault of white people, who are just getting a taste of what they have inflicted on others for centuries.

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About Matthew Boose

Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose. ‏

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

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