Obama in Dallas: Will the Real America Please Stand Up?

I saw the entirety of Obama’s speech at the Dallas memorial service for the five fallen police officers.

You have to give Obama this: He can certainly play the crowd.  He is much like the evangelical preacher who can manipulate his audience with ease. He seems able to talk at length without reference to notes, and he can appear to speak from his heart off the cuff. But these are the skills of a consummate actor who knows how to memorize a script (or at least read convincingly from a teleprompter) and breathe life into it, while giving the impression that he is speaking spontaneously. Reagan had the same gift, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the former drama teacher is getting better at acquiring it.

But this a matter of style. What matters is content. So let’s reflect upon the veracity of Obama’s words and contentions.

Obama’s message, as I recall it, was essentially this:

1. We are all one family. “I see what’s possible when we recognize that we are one American family, all deserving of equal treatment. All deserving of equal respect. All children of God. That’s the America I know.”
2. The divided America that critics portray is not the America he sees. “We are not as divided as we seem. And I know that because I know America.” In the real America, Blacks help Whites and Whites help Blacks without regard to their race or their backgrounds. The American spirit is what we saw in Dallas, where it was not about Black or White but human beings who came to each other’s assistance. Beneath the division, there is a fundamental unity.
3. Those who commit violence in the name of a cause hurt their cause. Love, not hate, is the answer. “As for those who use rhetoric suggesting harm to police, even if they don’t act on it themselves, well, they not only make the jobs of police officers even more dangerous, but they do a disservice to the very cause of justice that they claim to promote.”
4. People fighting for social justice must try to understand the predicament of police officers and the challenges they face. In turn, those who are not people of color must treat the complaints of Black citizens seriously. They must realize that Black people see the world differently because they are treated differently. They must try to understand that Black people suffer from unequal treatment on the streets and in the courts.

 Study after study shows that Whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently. [Obama thus fails to mention studies that show no racial bias in lethal force by police officers—the main issue of the BLM movement.] So if you are Black, you are more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested more likely to get longer sentences more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime. … We can’t simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed perhaps even by your White friends and coworkers, and fellow church members, again and again and again, it hurts.O

To cure the disease of hate and violence there must be mutual understanding and respect coming from both sides. We need reformers to change the system and we need police officers because there is evil in the world.

5. Race relations in America are not as bad as they seem. Things can get better. But the process begins when we confront bigotry within our families, within ourselves, in the workplace and everywhere else. “We know that bias remains. … We’ve heard it at times in our own homes. If we’re honest, perhaps we’ve heard prejudice in our own heads and felt it in our own hearts.”

So the question is, which is the real America? Whose narrative is more accurate? Obama’s—or ours? Which side of the culture war has it right?  At one point in his speech, the President confessed that “Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged.”  Indeed.

From our perspective, from the perspective of ethno-nationalists,  the mission of the Civil Rights movement—integration—MLK’s vision, has still not became a reality after 50 years for the reason that the assumptions upon which it rests are flawed. From the perspective of progressives, however, integration and equality are still not a reality because there is still “much work to be done.” If we try harder we can get it done. After all, we have come a long way since the Civil Rights Act.  According to the President, persistence is the key. Utopia is just around the corner. Just one more program. Just one more educational effort to instill White guilt and overcome the evils of White America. Just one more set of laws to quash any discussion of the unpleasant truths about the biological realities of race.

The question for me is this. At what point do Leftists and social justice warriors admit that integration will never work because it can’t work? What is the test? What is the deadline? Or is it open-ended? If you look at other fields in life, there are deadlines for meeting objectives, and if the objectives are not met, then every assumption must be re-visited. Heads must roll. Past policies must be reviewed.

If a hockey coach has, in three or four years failed turned the team around, he is fired. And if the General Manager has failed to improve the team within a decade, he too is typically given the pink slip. Corporations and unions and political parties approach the problem in the same way. If the party leader has lost two elections in a row, in almost all cases, he’s gone. There must be a shake-up. But for progressive ideologues, there should only be a shake-up in the front office. For them, it is fundamentally a personnel decision. The agenda must remain intact.

If ethnically or racial heterogeneous  societies are perpetually dysfunctional, there should surely be a point when diversity cultists admit that it doesn’t work, that governments have been trying to fit square pegs in round holes. Their vision was impaired. Utopia failed to meet the deadline.  But apparently there isn’t. Multiculturalists will never admit that their god has failed.

Ultimately then, it takes a civil war to make the point. Even then, however, the kumbaya crowd would blame the conflict on racist demagogues who fanned the flames or blame it on the failure of governments to smother racism in its cradle through diversity awareness workshops, affirmative action and anti-hate speech laws.

Political parties often resort to the same excuses. They tell themselves that they lost the election because they did not adequately convey their message. Seldom do they acknowledge that voters didn’t like the message.

Social engineers should be subject to the rules of evidence and scientific methodology. A scientific hypothesis must stipulate the results that would disprove it. Otherwise it is not a scientific hypothesis. Their proposition must be disprovable. They must say that if equal academic achievement and rates of criminality are still not realities after 20, 30, 40 or 50 years, then their premise was incorrect. If Blacks and aboriginals still have low SAT or IQ scores after 25 years of affirmative discrimination and mollycoddling, then the conventional notion of racial equality must be re-examined. Or if statistically, females still fail to exhibit the same aptitude as males in mathematics or Whites fail to match Asians in this area, then we must conclude that it is not all about social conditioning. Our brains are wired differently, and our talents and capabilities are in large measure genetically determined. White people can’t jump and Black folk can’t shot-put.

But all of this won’t happen because the agenda of social engineers is not evidence-based but ideologically driven.

If Obama’s America is the real America, then we have the right to ask, “Where is the evidence?”

I’m from Missouri, show me.