{"id":309847,"date":"2021-07-28T03:18:08","date_gmt":"2021-07-28T00:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/a-look-at-the-facts-shows-the-left-propagating-a-false-narrative\/"},"modified":"2021-07-28T03:18:08","modified_gmt":"2021-07-28T00:18:08","slug":"a-look-at-the-facts-shows-the-left-propagating-a-false-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/a-look-at-the-facts-shows-the-left-propagating-a-false-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"#A look at the facts shows the Left propagating a false narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#A look at the facts shows the Left propagating a false narrative<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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America may have its first mixed-race vice president, its first African-American secretary of defense and its first Latino and immigrant as secretary of homeland security, but the country has never been so racist. That, at least, is one of the disturbing conclusions being drawn from a new Gallup poll<\/a>, which found that the share of Americans reporting that race relations are bad or \u201csomewhat\u201d bad has reached 57 percent \u2014 the highest it\u2019s been in two decades.<\/p>\n

But are its findings really evidence of widespread racism in the US? Hardly. In fact, you need only look at the behavior of Americans \u2014 at the number of interracial marriages or police shootings of minorities, for example \u2014 to see that racism has almost never been so absent.<\/p>\n

Take interracial marriages. In 1958, 94 percent of whites opposed it \u2014 yet just 10 percent do today. Similarly, the long-running General<\/a> Social<\/a> Survey found that in the 1970s, nearly 60 percent of white Americans agreed with the statement that blacks shouldn\u2019t \u201cpush themselves where they\u2019re not wanted.\u201d In 2002, that figure fell to 20 percent \u2014 and the question was discontinued.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s much the same story with police shootings of African-Americans. Despite the charged rhetoric of the past year, which culminated in calls for entire police forces to be disbanded, such shootings are 60 to 80 percent lower than they were in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

So why is there such a misunderstanding between the American public and the reality of US race relations? The answer, I suspect, reflects a media-driven moral panic \u2014 one that is rooted in the racialization of identity-obsessed progressive politics.<\/p>\n

\"race
Research from Zach Goldberg that points to the media\u2019s focus on race has increased in seven years.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Indeed, the \u201crise\u201d of racism in America since 2014 is a social construct that reflects perception rather than daily life.<\/p>\n

This is largely a result of what Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described in 1973 as the \u201cavailability heuristic\u201d \u2014 the idea that vivid images rather than statistical reality tends to shape people\u2019s perceptions.<\/p>\n

For instance, people routinely overestimate vivid phenomena, from crime to the share of Muslims in their country, because these stories make the news<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Crime in America may have fallen every year before 2019 \u2014 but when asked about it by Gallup, most people in all but two years said crime had risen over the past year.<\/p>\n

\"NYPD
NYPD officers at the scene of a shooting in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, on July 26, 2021.<\/figcaption>
Stefan Jeremiah for New York Post<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So too with race. In some ways, this is to be expected. Whenever events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots or the killing of George Floyd make the news, people \u2014 shocked by what they are seeing \u2014 inevitably perceive race relations to be worse than they are.<\/p>\n

What is distinctive today, however, is the sustained determination of major progressive news outlets like The New York Times or CNN to center racism as a dominant theme<\/a> in American society.<\/p>\n

Ground-breaking research by Zach Goldberg<\/a> of Georgia State University found that the use of the term \u201cracism\u201d and similar terms in mainstream news outlets took off around 2015.<\/p>\n

What caused this spike? Goldberg cites social media and the new partisan clickbait business model in online journalism as the catalysts.<\/p>\n

Then, during the campaign for the 2016 US election, Donald Trump energized the enterprise. As The New York Times\u2019 Ben Smith recounted last year<\/a>: \u201cHeated Twitter criticism helped to retire euphemisms like \u2018racially charged.\u2019 The big outlets have gradually, awkwardly, given ground, using \u2018racist\u2019 and \u2018lie\u2019 more freely, especially when describing Mr. Trump\u2019s behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Protesters
Protesters get ready to march outside of the Hennepin County Government Center after former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd on June 25, 2021.<\/figcaption>
Christian Monterrosa\/AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Certainly, many of these outlets swiftly retired all objectivity and standards in favor of this new partisan model.<\/p>\n

One reason for this was the media\u2019s desire to tap into a mythic script of a white officer killing a black suspect. Indeed, Goldberg\u2019s study of the 2015-20 Washington Post police killings database reveals<\/a> that black police shooting victims received nine times the media coverage of white victims. As Coleman Hughes has observed<\/a>, when footage emerged in 2016 showing Tony Timpa, a white suspect, being suffocated as a Dallas officer placed his knee on his neck, the media looked the other way while the officers walked free.<\/p>\n

This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public\u2019s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in The Washington Post\u2019s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of \u201cunarmed,\u201d 27. Yet nearly half of \u201cvery liberal\u201d Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There were over twice as many unarmed whites killed by police as blacks but, as John McWhorter, author of the new book \u201cWoke Racism\u201d notes<\/a>, this never makes the news because it doesn\u2019t fit the narrative of white racial violence against African-Americans.<\/p>\n

The narrative of police racism is exacerbated by party politics. A young black man is around 10 times as likely to die in a car accident than from a police bullet, but only 10 percent of African-American Democrats and 20 percent white liberals get this question right \u2014 while more than 70 percent white Trump voters do.<\/p>\n

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5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael was unarmed yet he was shot 6 times. I stand with activists and organizers who continue the fight for justice for Michael. We must confront systemic racism and police violence head on.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) August 9, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

The impact of such warped perceptions cannot be overstated. But rather than trying to correct untruths, the American Left has leaned into these corrosive myths.<\/p>\n

Witness Elizabeth Warren tweeting that Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, despite the fact that the officer had been cleared by a federal grand jury of wrongdoing. Or, in the wake of the Chauvin verdict, Joe Biden reinforcing the irresponsible fiction that black people in America live in fear of their lives from police bullets:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must do more on police violence, so they don\u2019t have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. They don\u2019t have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

No doubt Biden was well-meaning, but he was, in effect, propagating a conspiracy; it was similar to telling an anti-vaxxer that their fears are well-placed and it is up to pharmaceutical companies to eliminate every last side effect before we can expect them to trust a jab.<\/p>\n

Of course, black Americans have had a historically uneasy relationship with the police, but that is no excuse for the blend of romanticism and virtue-signaling that seems to have gripped today\u2019s progressives.<\/p>\n

\"A
A protester carries a American flag upside down next to a burning building in Minneapolis in May 2020.<\/figcaption>
Julio Cortez, File\/AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While Democratic politicians and the media rightly held Trump to account for violating liberal democratic norms, such as claiming the election was stolen or encouraging the Capitol rioters, they were strangely silent when Biden said he was \u201cpraying for the right verdict\u201d in the Chauvin trial and Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters told a crowd in front of the courthouse to \u201cget more confrontational\u201d and let the judge \u201cknow that we mean business.\u201d Meanwhile, media interest in the record-setting $2 billion in damage caused by the riots following George Floyd\u2019s death \u2014 which struck a disproportionate number of minority-owned businesses \u2014 was minimal.<\/p>\n

It was a disturbing reflection of the distorted, racialized reality they now inhabit. Just don\u2019t expect them to take responsibility for it.<\/p>\n

Reprinted with permission from UnHerd<\/em><\/a>\n <\/div>\n