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June 19, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

54:30

The Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations | Ep. 1035

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	It's Juneteenth, a great time to celebrate American history.
	The goalposts for anti-racism keep moving further and further down the field, and Joe Biden gets a pass on, like, everything.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Your data is your business protected at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
	We're going to get to all the news in just a moment.
	Today, of course, is Juneteenth, which is the date that commemorates the last state to be read.
	The Emancipation Proclamation at the end of the Civil War was Texas, and the Emancipation Proclamation was read to a group of now freed slaves in Texas on this date in 1865.
	We'll talk about that, and then we'll talk about the legacy Of American history and exactly the after effects of all of this and why we are now having debates over whether America is truly free.
	We'll get to all of that in just a moment.
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	Okay, so today is June 19th, as I mentioned.
	That is Juneteenth.
	I'm going to read to you from the National Registry for Juneteenth.
	There's a website that's specifically dedicated to Juneteenth.
	They have a good sort of summary of what exactly happened on Juneteenth.
	Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.
	Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free.
	This is two and a half years after, of course, the Emancipation Proclamation, which had become official on January 1st, 1863.
	But the Emancipation Proclamation didn't have much effect in Texas because, of course, the Civil War was still on.
	One of General Granger's first orders of business when he arrived was to read to the people of Texas General Order No.
	which began most significantly with this.
	The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with the proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
	This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.
	As the website points out, the reactions to this profound news ran from pure shock to immediate jubilation out.
	Now, of course, Juneteenth didn't end the story of racism in America or discrimination in America, but it was the end of slavery, and it was the marker that America was attempting to fulfill its founding promises.
	Juneteenth should be a national holiday.
	The reason it should be a national holiday is because America—there's a good case to make that America essentially had two foundings.
	Neither one was in 1619.
	The first founding was in 1776 with the establishment of universal principles.
	And the second was in 1865 with the fulfillment of the promise for black Americans that they were not to be slaves or to be excluded from the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence.
	Of course, it would take another century for black Americans to really feel the full fruits of their rights because of endemic racism and white supremacy that existed in the United States, particularly in the southern half of the United States.
	This was the beginning of the fulfillment of the dream of the founding fathers that they themselves were unable or unwilling, depending on which founder you're talking about, to fulfill.
	So Juneteenth should absolutely be a national holiday.
	And in fact, there are Republicans today who are sponsoring that.
	I mean, among other symbols that we should be looking at, by the way, Frederick Douglass.
	Good case he should be on the national currency.
	And they've been talking about Harriet Tubman.
	That's fine.
	Harriet Tubman was a hero, a heroine.
	But Frederick Douglass is my pick.
	Frederick Douglass, the guy who Okay, so with all of that said, this should be a time to celebrate how far American history has come.
	Because let's be quite real about this, anybody who's attempting to link the lives today of black Americans with the lives of slaves and make a comparison between the two, That comparison just does not exist.
	If you were living in slavery versus black Americans at the highest levels of government, of culture, of business, having all the same rights, and in some cases, having actual legally established preferences, in particular college admissions, The idea of that being a reality in the United States in 1865 would have been ultimately, would have been for most, for virtually all black Americans, completely unthinkable.
	And it is an amazing achievement of the United States that we have worked so hard to vitiate the evil legacy of slavery and Jim Crow bigotry and racism in American society.
	However, of course, we are going to discuss in the United States this notion that all inequality is inequity.
	By celebrating Juneteenth, what we should be celebrating is the movement from slavery to freedom.
	The movement from the notion that society is going to create a glass ceiling over you to the idea that you're essentially responsible for your own fate and you're able to make your own decisions.
	And of course, that wasn't true for a hundred years after the Civil War.
	Black Americans were striving and fighting for their rights.
	They're striving and fighting to make themselves more prosperous and to grab a hold of the promises made in the Declaration of Independence.
	This is why it's so irritating to me when I see people rip on the American flag or the Declaration of Independence.
	All of the great civil rights leaders, from Frederick Douglass, to Booker T. Washington, to Martin Luther King, recognized that the Declaration of Independence was a promissory note that had not been actually provided for black Americans.
	It had not been fulfilled for black Americans.
	The promises of the Declaration of Independence were universal.
	So when people talk about the evils of the founding, what they fail to recognize is that the great civil rights leader, the best civil rights leaders, the most effective civil rights leaders, recognized that they were calling on Americans to live up to the standards that they had not lived up to heretofore.
	And it's really important to remember that.
	And that the goal was that when all was said and done, black and white would be equal, not in terms of result by race, but in terms of the rights that they could grab hold to.
	All would be treated as individuals capable of making free and independent decisions.
	Because that's what freedom is, the ability to make free and independent decisions.
	And what that suggests is that the cause of America, when it comes to racism, is vitiating actual racism.
	Getting rid of actual racism.
	And it is not a substitute to simply suggest that equality is the definition, equality of outcome is the definition of anti-racism.
	Because those two things are not actually related.
	There's no equality of outcome in the white community.
	There's great income gaps in the white community.
	There's great income gaps between old people and young people.
	Equality of outcome is not the measure of anti-racism.
	Anti-racism is the measure of anti-racism.
	Being against racism.
	Now, as we're going to discuss, the definition of racism seems to have shifted in modern America from you're against bigotry and discrimination on the basis of race to you oppose all the institutions of American society that are shot through with history and with historic racism.
	And that shift is a really dangerous one because it implies that the only way to be anti-racist, so to speak, is to recognize your own sin, even if you haven't sinned, And to tear down the institutions of American society, which after all were founded in white supremacy.
	That shift from Martin Luther King-style anti-racism to intersectionality-style anti-racism is a dramatic one.
	And it leads to the sort of stories that we are seeing today from the New York Times.
	The New York Times It's a piece today by Patrick Sharkey, Keeanga-Yamata Taylor, and Yaryna Sekes.
	It's called The Gaps Between White and Black America in Charts.
	And we're going to go through this in a second because the obvious implication is that the reason that these gaps exist and have continued to exist is because of continuing systemic racism in the United States.
	Now, there are after-effects to history.
	I've said this before a thousand times on the show.
	There are obviously after-effects to history.
	If you bar somebody from buying a house in 1960, that will have some follow-on effect for not being able to give your house to your kids, for example.
	That is true.
	But there are certain gaps that certainly cannot be explained by history, and that includes the continuing wide income gap, or the education gap, or the single motherhood gap.
	That cannot be explained by history, particularly when you are looking at such a radical escalation in particular communities.
	To suggest that America is more racist now than it was in 1960.
	And when in 1960, the black single motherhood rate, by the way, single motherhood is the single greatest indicator of intergenerational poverty, when the black single motherhood rate in 1960 was 20%, and when today, it is in excess of 70%, and in some heavily black communities, it's in excess of 90%, that cannot be blamed on racism.
	It cannot.
	There's just no way to do it.
	Especially because the single motherhood rate has risen concomitantly in the white community, just not quite as fast.
	And you can't cite racism when you are saying, okay, I'm going to get a girl pregnant and walk out, which leads to poverty, which leads to poverty for your kid and for the woman you knocked up.
	If you decide to drop out of school, this is a personal decision that you cannot blame on racism or slavery.
	But the attempt to say that everything that is unequal in outcome is a remnant of slavery and Jim Crow is a dangerous but pervasive idea in today's modern America.
	We're gonna get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so the implication of today's new take on racism.
	As we'll discuss, there's a fantastic, fantastic author named Shelby Steele who has talked about the redefinition of racism.
	He suggests that we have changed the definition of racism from actual racial discrimination to what he calls globalized racism, the idea that all institutions of American life are shot through with racism.
	This is the way that the media cover all gaps, right?
	All inequality of outcome is obvious evidence of inequality of rights, which is obviously not true.
	That is obviously untrue.
	Kids within the same family have dramatically different income.
	Dramatically different income.
	I have three younger sisters.
	Our incomes are dramatically different.
	Across the spectrum.
	We grew up in exactly the same house.
	But the idea from the New York Times and from so many on the left is that if there's inequality of outcome, this evidence is that America's continuing legacy of racism.
	So as I mentioned, there's this article in the New York Times that highlights some of the gaps between white and black America in charts.
	So they show the unemployment rate age 16 years or over, and they show that basically the gap in the unemployment rate between black and white has been fairly consistent since 1960.
	It actually spiked a bit.
	The gap seems to have spiked a bit during the 1980s, but it has gone back down now to probably its lowest point.
	If you look at this chart, it looks like the lowest point in American history.
	That gap was about 3% up until the pandemic hit.
	Okay, which is a testament, frankly, to President Trump's economy.
	I mean, that obviously is a thing.
	But the unemployment rate, so the suggestion here is that if blacks are historically less employed than whites, even after the Civil Rights Act, and that the gap wasn't closed, then nothing must have changed.
	Or alternatively, a lot of things changed.
	Alternatively, there were great society programs that paid welfare.
	Alternatively, there were affirmative action programs designed to get people into college of minority races.
	Alternatively, there's a change in behavior as well.
	To simply look at the gap in the unemployment rate and then say racism, like, if all you knew was one factor, right?
	Unemployment and racism.
	What you would suggest is racism hasn't changed.
	So this chart doesn't look like it changed all that much in terms of the gap.
	But obviously many things changed, including the number of black Americans who are graduating from high school.
	The answer is 92%.
	Including the number of black Americans who are going to college.
	The answer is approximately, what, 26% now?
	Go through a four-year college.
	So that, I mean, that is a massive difference.
	Okay, it's a massive difference.
	By the way, again, there's this chart.
	It shows share of people 25 years and over who completed four years of college or more.
	And it shows that the gap between white and black has actually risen a little bit since 1960.
	Not that many people went to college in 1960 period between white and black.
	But now today, 36% of white Americans over 25 completed four years of college.
	26% of black Americans have completed four years of college or more, which is an amazing, amazing statistic, right?
	Over a quarter of black Americans are completing four years of college or more.
	Now, what you would have to recognize also is that the black dropout rate is a lot higher in college than the white dropout rate in college.
	Black student college graduation rates remain significantly low.
	The nationwide college graduation rate for black students stands at 42%.
	There are a lot of black students who are going into college and that are not graduating college.
	And by the way, it's largely, statistically speaking, black men are more likely to drop out of college than black women are.
	But that does explain part of the gap.
	So one of the things that has happened is again, people refuse to look at ancillary factors that might explain continuing gaps.
	Because the idea is just a very simplistic single factor analysis.
	If there's a gap, that gap is due to continuing endemic racism.
	If you look at median household income, you see that there has been a continuing gap between white and black and that the gap has actually risen in terms of median household income.
	Now you might think to yourself, okay, why has the median household income gap risen given the fact that Racism, racial discrimination in employment has been outlawed since the 1960s in both the private and the public sectors.
	In every state in the union.
	That's what the Civil Rights Act did.
	Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, essentially.
	Why exactly is that gap still existent?
	Well, maybe it has something to do with high school dropout rates.
	Maybe it has something to do with the fact that so many public schools are failing black students and so many black students are graduating from high school without actually having rudimentary skills and have to go into remedial education even if they go to college.
	I mean, there are significant gaps in the number of students by race who are going into remedial education once they hit college.
	Maybe this has to do with the fact that there are so many single moms, right?
	That changes the median household income.
	If the mom and dad are living together, the median household income, right, it's a mom and dad, their combined income is going to be higher.
	If more people are unmarried, that's two separate households now, right?
	So the household income is lower.
	In other words, what the New York Times is trying to do with all of this is imply that racism is still the deciding factor in American life.
	And in fact, they make this absolutely clear in the New York Times piece.
	They suggest that in many parts of the country, black and white Americans continue to live in very different worlds.
	This distinctive feature of American inequality is not an accidental development, but rather a result of policy choices.
	Again, the idea is that historic discrimination is what has caused all of this, which would not really explain why the black middle class was growing faster in the 1950s before the Civil Rights Act than it did after the Civil Rights Act in 1965.
	Another example, the home ownership rate.
	So the home ownership rate Prior to 1990, going all the way back to about 1980, there was a huge gap between white homeownership and black homeownership.
	Well, as black income has risen, and it has risen dramatically from 1960 and on, wouldn't you expect more black homeownership?
	And yet black homeownership is actually at the lowest levels that it has been since 1990.
	So, what exactly is going on here?
	You can't really blame redlining for lack of homeownership by black Americans in 2020 at this point.
	But what you can blame is rising real estate prices and low income.
	Right?
	That's what you can blame.
	How about sentenced male prisoners per 100,000 residents of the corresponding group?
	So the idea here is that black Americans are being discriminated against in the criminal justice system.
	So the gap has actually dropped fairly dramatically from what it once was over the past 20 years.
	But for every 100,000 black males, 2,272 of them will end up sentenced to prison, as opposed to 392 for every 100,000 white males.
	Is that the result of racism or is that the result of individuals making criminal decisions?
	The basic notion here that the New York Times is pushing, and this is the notion that the left is pushing, Is that all inequality of outcome is due to discrimination, continuing discrimination in the system, which is not correct.
	It is not factually correct.
	When we look at the actual rationales for why income has remained low, or why, for example, young black men who are growing up in high-income households are significantly more likely to fall out of the top quintile than young black women, you have to determine whether there are individual decisions that are at play here.
	You have to remove the confounds.
	But for the left, it's not necessary to remove the confounds, because the only thing that is important is implying that all of America's institutions are systemically racist, and therefore, the onus is on restructuring those institutions so as to achieve equal outcome, not equal rights.
	And this view has infused so much of our public thinking right now.
	And what it does, really, is it makes white liberals responsible for—it's incredibly paternalistic.
	It makes white liberals responsible for the uplift of black Americans.
	That's really what it is.
	It's a bunch of white liberals feeling good about themselves because, oh man, these systems are so bad.
	But you know what?
	I can fight racism because these poor black people, I can't hold them to the decision not to have a child out of wedlock or to finish high school.
	But if I restructure the system, I can feel so good about myself.
	It's really on me.
	It's really on me.
	Me, the white liberal, to fix life for the individual black person.
	Even if the equal rights are guaranteed by the Constitution, by law, in every state in the United States, it's up to me to guarantee equal outcome.
	It makes people feel so good.
	And not only does it make people feel good, it leads to what Condoleezza Rice has correctly called the soft bigotry of law expectations.
	And this is how you end up with articles like this one from Dr. Robin D.G.
	Kelly, professor of American history, in the New York Times called, What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives?
	The idea being, she's a professor of American history at UCLA, the basic idea being that we cannot expect as Americans, black Americans, not to riot and loot and burn things.
	The idea being because all of the systems are so inherently corrupt that it causes black anger and therefore it is wrong to expect black Americans not to riot and burn and loot things.
	Why?
	First of all, I think everyone should not riot and burn and loot.
	It turns out there are some white Americans doing that too.
	But you don't get to riot and loot and burn things because the supposition here is that all inequality, again, of outcome is the result of evils in the American system and that rage and that people cannot therefore be expected to operate within the system.
	That operating within the system is itself a form of bowing to the system and the system itself is inherently racist.
	And therefore, the truest form of fighting against the system is things like rioting and looting.
	This is the soft bigotry of law expectations Condoleezza Rice was talking about.
	We can't expect people to abide by the law because after all, the law was originally founded in racism in 1619.
	And therefore, expecting people to abide by the law and live under the quote unquote racist regime.
	That means that you are asking people to sacrifice their own honor to obey the law.
	It's absurd on its face.
	It does not make the lives of black Americans better in any way, conceivably, like any way at all, because it turns out the path to prosperity in the United States is wide open if you make the right decisions.
	Only 2% of Americans Who do the following three things.
	Graduate high school, don't have a kid, before you are married and get a job, end up in permanent poverty in the United States, according to the Brookings Institute.
	You do those three things, you won't end up in permanent poverty.
	The soft bigotry of low expectations is one of the more dangerous things that is happening in the United States right now, and it's tearing the country apart.
	And it's largely being pressed by white liberals who want to feel good about themselves and establish their moral superiority to their fellow white person for acknowledging their own sin, and subtly to establish their own white supremacy by suggesting that black people are incapable of taking care of themselves and need white saviors to come in and help them.
	That's it, which Shelby Steele writes about this and he is exactly right.
	We're gonna get into Shelby Steele's perspective.
	He expresses it better than I can express it for sure.
	We're gonna get to that in just a moment.
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	So as I say, The idea that all inequality of outcome is due to a racist system leads to the soft bigotry of low expectations in which we can't expect black Americans not to loot.
	Okay, there's an actual article in the New York Times by a professor of American history, Dr. Robin Kelly, at the New York Times.
	Why are they looting?
	It's asked every time protests against police violence erupt into civil unrest.
	We know the answers by now.
	Poverty, anger, age, rage, and a sense of helplessness.
	For some, it is a form of political violence.
	For others, destructive opportunism.
	There appears to be no single motive.
	That white youth figure prominently among looters during the recent wave of unrest confounds easy explanations.
	No, it actually doesn't.
	It actually doesn't.
	It turns out the vast majority of people who are looting have no interest in making a political statement.
	They are instead just stealing crap.
	That is true for white people.
	It is true for black people.
	If you are getting a TV off the back of George Floyd, you're not doing anything for George Floyd.
	You're just a piece of crap.
	But we can't say that, right?
	We're not supposed to say that because apparently looting is a form of standing up to the system.
	This is the same mentality that led Maxine Waters to call the LA riots, which largely burned down black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the LA uprising.
	Uprising against what?
	Against the system itself, right?
	According to this columnist, Let me offer a more productive question instead.
	What is the effect of obsessing over looting?
	It deflects from the core problem that brought people to the streets.
	The people, the police, keep killing us with impunity.
	Instead, once burning and looting start, the media often shifts to the futility of violence as a legitimate path to justice.
	Crime becomes the story.
	Riots, we are told, cause harm by foreclosing constructive solutions.
	But such rebellions have not only shined a spotlight on American racism, they've also spawned investigations and limited reforms when traditional appeals have failed.
	The evidence for this is extraordinarily limited.
	But again, this is all in pursuit of the myth that the greatest obstacle to black success in the United States is white racism.
	And now the kind of bleeding edge of that is supposedly the police.
	And this is how you end up with the New York Times talking about the Rayshard Brooks shooting in Atlanta this way.
	Police decisions are scrutinized after Rayshard Brooks' fatal encounter.
	The original headline was, Rayshard Brooks' final hour was a jarring panorama of policing.
	Rayshard Brooks resisted arrest after a 25-minute conversation with police officers, wrestled two police officers to the ground, took a taser off a police officer, tried to tase one police officer, and then while running away tried to tase another police officer and was shot for his trouble.
	That is not a panorama of policing.
	That's a man acting like a criminal who was shot justifiably.
	And that's what a grand jury is going to find.
	The charges in this Atlanta case are absurd.
	But again, if the police are stand-ins for the evil system, then the police are the ones who have to answer for a man acting like a criminal.
	We can't, of course, expect Rayshard Brooks not to act like a criminal, because to do so would be to engage in the fallacy that people are responsible for their own actions in the end in a free country.
	Now, none of this has any relationship to reality, right?
	In terms of the general idea that police are the greatest obstacle to black freedom in America.
	It's just not correct.
	In fact, the officer in this particular case in Atlanta, he gave CPR to Rayshard Brooks.
	After he shot him, he gave CPR to him.
	But the narrative holds.
	And it combines with a narrative of white penitence.
	White penitence.
	And the white penitence is not designed to actually alleviate the problem.
	The white penitence is designed instead to do something else.
	And that is to reestablish the moral authority of white liberals.
	Because the argument is that white people lost moral authority because of Jim Crow and racism and slavery, which is completely fair on issues of race.
	And the only way that the moral authority can be restored is if white people who are liberal express their guilt and then proceed to treat black people paternalistically by offering a bunch of systemic changes.
	Being against the system becomes the marker of being a good person.
	And that's what white liberals are doing right now.
	I'm going to get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so I wanna read you from a fantastic book By the author Shelby Steele, who teaches over at Hoover Institute.
	And the book is called White Guilt.
	And it really does explain, I think in detail, the worldview that ends with the belief that all inequality of outcome is an evil in America and explains why we are seeing these religious, these acts of religious penitence From the left, from the white left particularly, and why we are seeing the attempt to rip away American history.
	I mean, there was a George Washington statue that got torn down in Portland yesterday.
	This is all of a piece.
	So I never do this, but I think that this is a very important subject and I'm gonna let somebody who is more well-versed on this than I speak to you here.
	So Shelby Steele.
	Again, in his book, White Guilt, he talks about white guilt.
	He says white guilt is, quote, the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one's race is associated with racism.
	Whites and American institutions must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it.
	But once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race equality, social justice, poverty, and so on.
	They step into a void of vulnerability.
	The authority they lose transfers to the victims of historical racism and becomes their great power in society.
	So in other words, when you acknowledge the guilt, the white guilt, that white supremacy was a governing force in the United States, you immediately lose all authority to speak on moral questions.
	Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, says Shelby Steele, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative, that they are not racist.
	Whites in American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise.
	White guilt leaves no room for moral choice.
	It does not depend on the goodwill or the genuine decency of people.
	It depends on their fear of stigmatization, their fear of being called a racist.
	Because if you are called a racist, you lose moral authority and you are linked to a past that you don't belong to.
	But because you are a member of the white race, you are therefore guilty by association with the people who were creators of these institutions and did exist in a regime of white supremacy.
	You combine this with the new redefinition of racism.
	So it used to be that you were guilty for your own racist act, right?
	For your own racist feelings.
	That was the Martin Luther King version of racism he was trying to wipe from the human heart and largely was successful in doing so.
	Then there is the broader version of racism.
	The broader version of racism is an essentially Marxist version of racism, says Shelby Steele.
	Ugly human prejudices like racism did not just remain isolated in the hearts of racists.
	These dark passions worked by an invisible hand to generate societal structures that impersonally oppress.
	As people simply conformed to mundane standards of social decency, they executed a bigotry and shaped society around it without feeling animus toward minorities.
	The Marxian emphasis on structures and substructures gave the new militant leaders of the time, the 60s, an infinitely larger racism to work with, a systemic and sociological racism that was far more determinative than the simpler immoral racism of the Martin Luther King era.
	So the Martin Luther King racism says that America would be free except for these obstacles Institutional obstacles of racism.
	Get rid of the institutional obstacles of racism.
	Jim Crow laws.
	Racism in interactions.
	And we will now be free.
	And now the freedom is on us, right?
	Responsibility is on us.
	Once you suggest that it has infused all of the institutions, and the institutions themselves define human beings, the only way to change the system is to rip down the institutions.
	It is a very Marxist view of human life, that the institutions shaped you, that people did not shape the institutions, and that your fundamental decency within the context of an evil system does not change the evil system, right?
	You can say as much as you want, I'm not a racist, so long as you are part of an institutionally racist system, there is no getting away from the fact that simply by upholding the system, you are adhering to racism.
	Shelby Steele says globalized racism, this is the new definition of racism, is quote racism inflated into a deterministic structural and systemic power.
	Global racism seeks to make every racist event the tip of the iceberg so the redress will be to the measure of the iceberg rather than to the measure of its tip.
	Right?
	Because once you say that everything is infused with racism, all you have to do is point to a hotspot like George Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery and then say that this is the entire United States, writ small.
	Right?
	That's the tip of the iceberg.
	Now we have to attack the structures.
	It is a reconceptualization of racism designed to capture the fruit of the new and vast need in white America for moral authority and racial matters.
	And this is really the key.
	The basic idea here is that if white people are suffering from racial guilt because, as they should, they look to the history of the United States and are ashamed by white supremacy, that if that is the case, the way that white people, particularly white liberals, seek to reestablish moral authority is to prove that they are not racist.
	And the way to prove that they are not racist is by standing aside from the institutions that supposedly are shot through with racism.
	So dissociation becomes the key.
	Dissociation and labeling and cancel culture, these become a key.
	By the way, Shelby Steele was writing this in 2006.
	Suddenly, in American life, the matter of responsibility was qualified by a new social morality.
	If you were black and thus a victim of racial oppression, this new morality of social justice meant you could not be expected to carry the same responsibilities as others.
	In other words, because of social justice and the history of racial oppression, we can't expect you not to loot, right?
	That's the piece in the New York Times.
	The point was that American society no longer had the moral authority to enforce a single standard of responsibility for everyone because, by its own admission, it had not treated everyone the same.
	Thus, in the national consciousness after the 60s, individual responsibility became synonymous with injustice when applied to blacks.
	Thus, since the 60s, black leaders have made one overriding argument, that blacks cannot achieve equality without white America taking responsibility for it.
	And this just suits white liberals to a tee.
	The idea that equality can only be established if they are given the power to restructure American society.
	Because it invests them again with moral authority, the moral authority they've lost because of white guilt.
	So now they have the power to restructure American society.
	And not it's great.
	Not only do they get to show that they are better than other white people for having accepted White guilt.
	They also then get to restructure institutions without actually caring what happens to black people who are harmed by the restructuring of those institutions.
	This is why you see so many white upper crust liberals in Hollywood tweeting about defund the police when they won't be affected by defund the police one iota.
	This leads, as Shelby Steele says, to white blindness.
	A blindness to the human reality of minorities that occurs when whites look at racial issues but see only the contingency they must meet to restore their own moral authority.
	In other words, what do I have to do to make myself feel better and make me feel like I'm on top of the moral pantheon again?
	White blindness is an unconscious self-absorption by which whites see racial issues and even interracial encounters as opportunities to dissociate from historic racism.
	Every time you interact with a black person, it's an opportunity for you to show that you are not a racist and therefore recapture your moral authority.
	And of course, you can't recapture your moral authority unless you rip the entire system, which as we have said, is an indicator of globalized racism.
	Dissociation requires evidence of a proactive effort, a self-conscious and highly visible display.
	This is all Shelby Steele.
	And again, I'm reading to you at length here because I think that he expresses this so much more eloquently than I would.
	He says, people who are in the grip of white blindness and thus unaware of their true motivations always miss the human being inside the black skin.
	Your color represents you in the mind of such people.
	They will have built a large part of their moral identity and possibly their politics about around how they respond to your color.
	Thus, a part of them, the moral part, is invested not in you, but in some idea of what your color means.
	And when they see you, the individual, you a black person, they instantly call to mind this investment and determine once again to honor it.
	They're very likely proud of the way they've learned to relate to your color, proud of the moral magnanimity it gives them an opportunity to express.
	So in meeting you, they actually meet only a well-rehearsed and better part of themselves.
	This is the sort of pretension that Jordan Peele mocks in Get Out.
	The people who are walking around with kente cloths and saying they voted for Obama twice.
	So Shelby Steele, in the age of white guilt, white blindness has been driven not by racism, but by the white need to dissociate from racism.
	Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today, not out of bigotry, but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority.
	When they find a way to dissociate from racism, diversity, politically correct language, political liberalism itself, there's little incentive to understand blacks as human beings.
	Dissociation makes whites human again.
	It gives whites the right to speak on these issues.
	The more you say that America is racist, the more you say your fellow citizens are racist, the more you say the systems are racist, the more moral authority you have.
	This is why you will see people kneeling.
	They're not kneeling to express actual penitence.
	They're kneeling to reestablish moral authority.
	Post-60s American liberalism, says Shelby Steele, preserves the old racist hierarchy of whites over blacks as virtue itself, and it grants all whites who identify with it a new superiority.
	In effect, it says you are morally superior to other whites and intellectually superior to blacks.
	The white liberal's reward is this feeling that because he has erred to the knowledge of the West, yet morally enlightened beyond the West's former bigotry, he is really a new man, a better man than the world has seen before.
	Because disassociation is a claim of superiority, it generates a kind of collective narcissism, an irrational yet utterly certain belief in the moral superiority of post-60s dissociational liberalism.
	Dissociational meaning you dissociate from all the institutions.
	You say, I'm not associated with it.
	I dissociate from those institutions and from a history of American racism.
	In this liberalism, one does not argue by logic or principle.
	One argues by dissociation.
	Only in dissociation are authority, legitimacy, and power available.
	When the American left responded to the crisis of white guilt and began to define social virtue as mere dissociation, it effectively started the culture war.
	Dissociation is always achieved at the expense of democratic principles and demanding values grounded in fairness and individual responsibility, what in shorthand might be called the culture of principle.
	It is important stuff because as we're going to see, all of the sort of virtue signaling that you are seeing from the white left today is about dissociation, it is about an attempt to re-establish moral authority, and it is about control.
	It is not about healing the country.
	It is not about making the country a better place.
	Because if you actually want black Americans to be just as successful as white Americans and close all of those gaps, what you actually want is for people to make successful decisions on an individual level that lead to success.
	That is the thing you want more than anything in the world.
	What you want is not to incentivize behavior that leads to unsuccess or pretend that a few affirmative action stops are going to solve the problem of bad education in the black community overall by statistics.
	What you don't want is these sort of displays of pathos.
	What you actually want are more opportunities, more freedoms, and more demands for individual responsibility.
	Barack Obama tried this, and Barack Obama was shouted out of the room by a lot of people on the left when he suggested that individual responsibility was the first key to black Americans rising in a free society.
	That, of course, is 100% true, and it's true for everyone, not just black Americans.
	It's true for white Americans.
	It's true for Hispanic Americans.
	It's true for Asian Americans.
	If you want Americans to do well, you need to recommend that freedom be exercised responsibly.
	And that you white liberals, you are not responsible for your own savior complex paternalistic, I'm going to restructure the systems so certain people are redressed of history's grievances.
	Okay, again, that's particularly true when you're talking about people who are two generations removed at this point from the Civil Rights Act, and at least five generations removed from slavery.
	You have to be talking instead about what are the actual factors behind these gaps, not what makes you feel good by creating some program that is likely to be unsuccessful.
	This is why you see people shouting about the police at the same time that what many members of the black community, I would say the vast majority of black Americans who are living in high crime areas need more than anything else is more policing, more policing.
	They need less crime in their neighborhoods.
	That's what leads to investment.
	That's what leads to people bringing their money in and their tax dollars that then go to the local schools.
	But instead, it's all about white people I mean, so much of this really is about white guilt and white blindness.
	That's the real problem here.
	It really is a huge problem.
	We're going to get to the displays of penitence that really are dishonest in one second.
	First, let us talk about something great that you can do for Father's Day.
	So imagine your father opening up something he got in the mail and it's like, what is this for Father's Day?
	What could it possibly be?
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	Okay, well, we're going to get into the acts of penitence, the displays of penitence that really are about the reestablishment of moral authority by white leftists who want to feel superior to other white people.
	And also want to feel paternalistic for black people and not treat black Americans as individual human beings just as capable and in many cases more capable than white Americans of making good decisions.
	We're gonna get to that in just one second.
	First, you know, it's that time of the week when we show somebody with the Tumblr, right?
	It is the Tumblr time of week.
	The magic is about to happen.
	So, here is today's.
	It comes courtesy of Emily Kobayashi.
	She shows herself holding a leftist tears tumbler, standing above Chaz.
	You can actually see Chaz over in the background.
	She has delightfully labeled it for us.
	She has a 10th floor view of our nascent nation state, where the leftist tears are flowing as the proletariat suffers soil shortages.
	Hashtag leftist tears tumblers.
	Well done, Emily.
	Well done.
	In the picture, again, she's a surgeon, so she's doing some good for the world, unlike the people over in Chaz.
	Thanks for the picture.
	Keep up the work.
	Keep up the good work.
	Stay safe out there in all of the insanity.
	If you are not already a Daily Wire member, you should consider getting a reader's pass to dailywire.com.
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	Matt Walsh has a brand new article called, "No, America Didn't Invent Slavery," which of course is 100% true.
	Slavery has been endemic to humankind since history, like all of it.
	And the idea that America is uniquely evil because America had slavery in it is not true.
	American slavery was an evil, and a very deep evil.
	And America deserves all of the guilt for its slavery.
	But to pretend that it was an outlier in human history is simply absurd.
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	So we are now in this spin cycle of what can you do to prove that you're not racist?
	What can you do to prove you're not racist?
	Well, you can disassociate from anything that could tangentially be perceived as racist.
	You can disassociate from all of America's institutions.
	You can dissociate from America's history.
	As Shelby Steele says, the key to white blindness and white guilt, and banishing white guilt via white blindness, is to dissociate from exactly the institutions that are most likely to grant success to everyone if proper decisions are made.
	And there are plenty of grifters in this space.
	Robin DiAngelo is the author of a book called White Fragility.
	And what I love about this is that Robin DiAngelo is a white author making just a bundle off of, I mean, her book was like number one on Amazon.com, all about white fragility.
	And the book is just a trash heap.
	It basically suggests that even if you're concerned about racism, this is just evidence of white fragility.
	Basically, no matter what you do, if you're white, you're wrong.
	Which is a great way for you also to establish your moral authority.
	You just say I'm wrong all the time.
	That's not actually a way for you to say sorry.
	It's a way for you to say I'm better than all these other white people.
	And also, I am responsible for all the world's ills.
	By the way, when you acknowledge you are responsible for all the world's ills, when you take the world's ills on your shoulders, doesn't that grant you an awful lot of authority?
	Like a tremendous amount of authority?
	So, she appeared with Jimmy Fallon because our late night TV has basically just become woke programming at this point.
	Here's Robin DiAngelo with her crappy book White Fragility on Jimmy Fallon last night.
	Okay, so what if you could just give us feedback on our inevitable and often unaware racist assumptions and behaviors?
	And I'll never forget this black man raising his hand and saying, it would be revolutionary.
	Wow.
	And, you know, just like, just take that in.
	I just want all the white people to just take that in.
	Revolutionary, that we would receive the feedback with grace, reflect, and seek to change our behavior.
	That's how difficult we are.
	Wow.
	That's how big a-holes we are.
	Jimmy Fallon just looks like he wants to die.
	And I mean, honestly, like if I were interviewing this person, I probably would want to die as well.
	Because again, the entire premise of the book is that white people are the most important people in the entire universe.
	Right.
	This is the it's the essence of white leftist arrogance.
	White people are the most important people in the world.
	Their feelings about race are the defining features of the world today.
	All credit and all blame goes on their shoulder.
	And as long as you dissociate, dissociate, dissociate, right?
	That's why you're getting cancel culture right now, because the threat of being called a racist is so high right now that you have to just dissociate from everything.
	How high is the threat?
	You're getting this abject virtue signaling from the stupidest places.
	The Chick-fil-A CEO, Actually asked yesterday for white people to shine black people's shoes to show embarrassment for racism.
	So I have a basic biblical principle.
	It actually differentiates, I would say, Judeo-Christian values from Hammurabi's code.
	Hammurabi's code, you could actually criminally sentence a child for the sins of their parents, right?
	Your parent murdered somebody, you execute the child.
	The Bible says you're not allowed to revisit the sins of the fathers on the sons.
	This is one of the key standards here.
	So how about this?
	How about you repent to the person that you sinned against But not for sins that somebody else did.
	How about that?
	But the idea here is that you are supposed to individually shine an individual black person's shoes because of a sin that you did not commit against a black person that you don't even know?
	This is Dan Cathy's idea of how we are going to cure the country.
	Really, well done.
	And again, what this is really about is then, and I don't dislike Dan Cathy.
	I mean, the guy is pro-traditional marriage by most accounts he's conserved, but this is insane.
	Okay, this is purely insane.
	Here he is saying that white people should shine black people's shoes to show embarrassment for racism.
	I invite folks just to put some words to action here.
	And if we need to find somebody that needs to have their shoes shined, we need to just go right on over and shine their shoes.
	And whether they got tennis shoes on or not, maybe they got sandals on, it really doesn't matter.
	But there's a time in which we need to have, you know, some personal action here.
	Maybe we need to give them a hug, too.
	I have a question.
	Did he get the guy's shoes dirty?
	If that feels awkward to you, it's because it is awkward.
	And it's about that CEO.
	Now he can say, when somebody says you're a racist, no, no, no.
	Didn't you see that video of me shining a black man's shoes?
	That's how not racist I am.
	That's how not racist I am.
	And let me tell you, I am solely responsible for the failures of everybody else around me.
	The height of arrogance.
	The height of silliness.
	And this is the same kind of principles that are pushed by Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility.
	Again, she asserts things like whiteness is not just a skin color, it's an entire system of oppression.
	All white people are complicit in perpetuating this system, is the basic idea.
	And once you accept that, well then, I guess that it all does become Shelby Steele's dissociation.
	That's all it's about.
	How far does this stupidity go?
	Here's how far it goes.
	Yesterday in Oakland, there were some quote-unquote nooses in a park.
	They weren't nooses.
	Okay, Oakland's mayor said five ropes found hanging from trees in a city park are nooses and racially charged symbols of terror.
	Her name is Libby Schaaf.
	This is the same woman who suggested that she was going to warn all the illegal immigrants in the Oakland area before ICE came to town.
	Okay, these things do not look remotely like nooses, by the way.
	Not remotely like nooses.
	If you've ever seen a noose, this does not look like a noose.
	This looks like workout equipment because it's workout equipment.
	And guess what?
	It turns out to have been workout equipment.
	The police department provided five photographs of trees, some of which showed knotted ropes, and one that appeared to have a piece of plastic pipe attached to a rope, hanging from tree limbs.
	Oh, you mean like to do, I don't know, push-ups?
	You mean to do, like, pulls?
	Right?
	This is all stuff that people do in gyms.
	They were removed by city officials.
	So who put them up?
	Victor Sangby, who is black, told KGO-TV that the ropes were part of a rigging that he and his friends used as part of a larger swing system.
	He also shared video of the swing in use.
	Out of the dozens and hundreds and thousands of people that walked by, no one has thought or looked anywhere close to a noose, he says.
	Folks have tried using it for exercise.
	It was a really fun addition to the park we tried to create.
	It's unfortunate that a genuine gesture of just wanting to have a good time got misinterpreted into something so heinous.
	Schaaf said that they were going to do a hate crime investigation anyway.
	She said officials must start with the assumption these are hate crimes.
	And then the mayor and Nicholas Williams, the city's director of Parks and Recreation, said it didn't matter whether the ropes were meant to send a racist message.
	She says intentions don't matter when it comes to terrorizing the public.
	Here is Libby Schaaf talking about dissociation.
	She's not only dissociating from racism here, she's dissociating from crap that isn't even racist and was put up in a public park by a black man for exercise.
	To demonstrate just how not racist she is.
	If this isn't the height of navel-gazing narcissism, I don't know what is.
	Here's Libby Schaaf explaining.
	Intentions don't matter when it comes to a hate crime investigation.
	I have a question.
	How could intentions possibly not matter in a hate crime investigation?
	The entire crime is the hate, which is the intent.
	How could you possibly suggest intentions don't matter in a hate crimes investigation?
	And by the way, if that's not true, then I said, if she's right, she should just go ahead and prosecute the black guy for putting up exercise equipment in the park.
	Just go ahead and do it.
	Prosecute him for a hate crime.
	Say that he was a racist for putting up exercise equipment in a park that doesn't look like a noose but might be construed by someone as a noose.
	Here's Libby Schaaf, idiot mayor of Oakland.
	We have to see this moment for what it is, a reckoning.
	And in Oakland, we cannot further terrorize or traumatize our black residents.
	And yes, the incidents of the last few weeks, but frankly of the last few centuries, is the backdrop upon which we have to make these decisions today.
	Enough is enough.
	And again, the intentions do not matter, because the harm is real.
	No, the harm is not real!
	And no, the intentions do matter!
	And also, if you're gonna talk about oppression over the centuries, let's see, it goes something like this.
	Black slavery, Jim Crow, Exercise equipment in the park put up by a black guy in Oakland.
	Not even on the chart, Libby Schaaf, you idiot!
	You stupid dolt!
	She says the symbolism of the rope hanging in the tree is malicious regardless of intent.
	It's evil!
	And it symbolizes hatred!
	Man, that feeling of white guilt must be, the feeling of white guilt which is connected with the, once it's been alleviated, the feeling of white supremacy, she's better than all the other white people and she's more intelligent than all the black people who must be patriarchally cared for by her, right?
	It doesn't matter.
	If a black person was offended by a thing that is completely non-offensive, well then Libby Schaaf is here to take care of you.
	Like, it's so, it's so paternalistic.
	It's so insanely paternalistic.
	It's just ridiculous.
	And this is also what stands behind the tearing down of the statues, right?
	You're disassociating from American history.
	If you dissociate from American history, then you're good.
	And it's not enough to dissociate from Confederate American history, right?
	That's not enough to dissociate from... By the way, I don't think that Americans should dissociate from American history.
	I don't.
	I think they should own American history.
	And they should study American history.
	And they should realize the evils of American history.
	Dissociating does no good.
	Dissociating is about you relieving your own feelings of inadequacy.
	It does not actually answer the problem of American history.
	It's designed to make you feel better dissociating.
	Right?
	Tearing down George Washington statues, again, goes to the broader argument, America's evil, America's racist.
	The proof that America's evil and America's racist is inequality of outcome that can only be alleviated by white leftists fixing America by ripping down her institutions to prove they're not racist and to reestablish their moral authority.
	So you get a bunch of white people in Portland pulling down a George Washington statue, again, the founder of the United States.
	Big crowd pulling down and then burning an American flag on top of it.
	Pretty obvious what is going on here.
	Pretty obvious what is going on here.
	It's an absurdity.
	It's a disgrace.
	But that is the goal.
	The goal is tear down the system.
	Tear down the system.
	All to make mostly white leftists feel better.
	That really is what so much of this is about.
	And guess what?
	Tearing down the system isn't going to help black Americans.
	It is not going to help black Americans.
	Black Americans, if they were a country, black Americans, they would be, I believe, what was it?
	The 20th most prosperous country on planet Earth, if black Americans were their own country.
	The pathway to success in America for black Americans is the same as the pathway to success for everyone else.
	Because this is a free country.
	And black people are free and independent and fully capable of making incredible decisions, which the vast majority of them do.
	Which the vast, vast majority of black Americans do.
	The white paternalism of the left is despicable and the attempt to tear down the only institutions that have ever provided for the prosperity, the wild prosperity of vast differences in race over time is the system that has prevailed in the United States.
	Thank God.
	And we have moved beyond the legalized racism of Jim Crow.
	We've moved beyond slavery.
	That's what Juneteenth is about celebrating.
	And the price of freedom for all Americans, white, black, right, left, the price of freedom is individual responsibility and making good decisions.
	And the best thing you can do for somebody is tell them that they have opportunity in the United States.
	Take hold of it with both hands.
	Take hold of it with both hands.
	Grab the opportunity.
	Take advantage of the opportunity.
	And if you actually see an instance of Martin Luther King style, definition racism, you know, somebody standing in your way, then tell us about it.
	But don't give me we have to tear down the entire system and don't give me that nooses in the park that are not nooses are actually just part of American history and don't give me and don't give me that looting and rioting are okay so long as they are carried out by people who have been historically victimized.
	That is soft bigotry of law expectations crap and all it does is make white leftists feel better and it does not forward the access and the success of black Americans one iota.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today for two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, have yourself a weekend, okay?
	Really take the weekend off and enjoy.
	As I recommended, I mean, I read from it broadly today, go buy a copy of White Guilt by Shelby Steele.
	I think it is incredibly both evocative and insightful.
	Go check that out, as opposed to one of these stupid books about white fragility that is storing up the bestseller charts to make white leftists feel better.
	Go check out Shelby Steele and read that over the weekend.
	That'll give you something to do.
	We'll see you back here on Monday.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
	You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
	I think there are enough of those already out there.
	We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
	So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
	Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.

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