This won’t be a long post, just a little thought exercise.
The current wave of what we’ll charitably call “revisionist history” is casting everything about the past in a new light using an explicitly racial lens. Doing so, as I’ve written before, is simple-minded and must by design ignore the vast majority of human history. As Leonydus Johnson put it on social media a few days back, “I didn’t realize this, but apparently, history didn’t start until white people showed up. And non-white countries have no history at all. Unless white people did something to them. Otherwise it was just Kumbaya, My Lord everywhere. Amazing.”
Amazing indeed. The Aztecs, the Mongols, and some other notoriously violent peoples of the past might like to have a word with today’s wokes, who are canceling their deeds from history.
One of the wokes’ calling cards is to cast every error of the past as somehow based on race and to claim that systems of human interaction are inherently racist whether they were designed that way or not.
Looking forward if the current revisionist trend continues, what will the future make of the current “defund the police” movement?
It was engineered and funded primarily by affluent white people. They built and funded the activist groups that have pushed the defund ideas for years. It was enacted or inflicted, depending on your point of view, by other affluent people. Affluent college-educated urban white people are almost mostly behind the lenient district attorneys who keep releasing criminals, when they even managed to get arrested.
Being successful in this inherently racist system makes you racist whatever your racial background, according to woke critical theory. I’m not making that up, that’s what they say, sometimes quite clearly. So even those non-white city council members who voted for defunding the police are successful in this inherently racist system, making them racists consciously or not. I don’t make up the rules here. They do.
So they’re at least potentially racists because they’re successful in a racist system.
The white elites — Mayor Bill de Blasio, Mayor Steve Adler, Mayor Jenny Durkan, and the like — who defunded the police voted to do something that systemically hurt people of color.
I’m not making that up either. Crime is spiking in our cities while suburban and rural areas remain relatively untouched. Crime is spiking disproportionately in urban areas. That’s where police were defunded.
Those areas are predominantly inhabited by people of color.
Therefore, the vote to defund the police is disproportionately hurting people of color, while the whiter suburbs and rural areas have not been as impacted. That’s a systemic impact.
Again, I’m not making this up. Take a look at this crime map of Austin, Texas, by Neighborhood Scout. Austin infamously defunded its police to the tune of about one-third of its budget in August 2020.
The cuts kicked in at the beginning of 2021. Crime was already on the rise but jumped up significantly since then. Austin had a triple shooting at a motel Tuesday night, just one of many recent shootings. The map above casts crime by neighborhoods, with the most dangerous being the deepest blue. That shooting, like most, happened east of 35, with many others happening downtown in the darker blue areas around the urban core.
It’s very clear that the most dangerous neighborhoods in Austin at the present time are those in the urban core and mostly to the east of Interstate 35, the heinous highway that bisects the city. The east side of the highway is more heavily minority than the west side. The farther west you go, generally the more affluent you get. Many of UT’s Longhorns quarterbacks and other top players come from that area and Lakeway farther to the west. They’re not poor minorities, by and large.
So what are we to make of all of this?
At the present, defunding the police is proving to be dangerous to people of color and unwise for politicians of Caucasian affluence, so while the former mostly cannot escape its consequences, the latter are doing everything they can to. It’s losing its steam, the media belatedly reports. Mayor Adler gaslights Austin that he didn’t defund the police, despite the incontrovertible fact that he did. His actions cut funds which cut departments which impacts police activities across the board. Crime is up.
In the future, defunding the police could be cast as a plot designed expressly to hurt and kill people of color. It’ll sure look like that, through the same critical theories and lenses the wokes are using now.
They see the Constitution itself as designed to keep people of color down, despite its historical context and despite the long-burning fuse it ignited to abolish slavery and racial systems in the long term.
Defunding the police demonstrably hurts people of color here and now. That’s irrefutable, whether it was intentional or not.
Even in the present, it looks like it was intentional. Never mind the woke future.
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