Last week, ex-police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The evidence on the murder charges was weak; the evidence on manslaughter was significantly stronger. Still, the jury took only 10 hours and zero questions to come to its conclusion: guilty on all counts.
In and of itself, the Chauvin case never should have been a national news story. After all, an average of three suspects are shot by police every day in the United States, and thousands of homicides that have nothing whatsoever to do with the police take place in the United States every year. Theoretically, national news stories should be indicative of profound national problems, not man-bites-dog statistical rarities.
But, of course, that was the entire point of elevating the George Floyd story to national attention: to declare it indicative of a deeper rot at the core of America. Thus, Chauvin was convicted not of his individual criminal activity but of a charge that was never even brought against him: the charge of racism. As Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison admitted, there was no evidence whatsoever that Chauvin was a racist, or that his killing of George Floyd was motivated by race. “We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did,” Ellison ruefully told incredulous “60 Minutes” host Scott Pelley. And Pelley, speaking for the entire establishment media — a left-wing bubble thoroughly invested in the narrative of systemic American racism — responded, “The whole world sees this as a white officer killing a black man because he is black.”
Pelley isn’t wrong. In the end, evidence for systemic racism is utterly unnecessary. Systemic racism requires no evidence of intent, either individual or systemic. It requires only evidence of disparate outcome by race. Which is why Ellison explained that even though he couldn’t charge Chauvin with a hate crime, he could charge the entire system with racism in the Chauvin case: “In order for us to stop and pay serious attention to this case and be outraged by it, it’s not necessary that Derek Chauvin had a specific racial intent to harm George Floyd. … (P)eople of color, Black people, end up with harsh treatment from law enforcement. And other folks doing the exact same thing just don’t.”
Now, statistically speaking, this is simply untrue. In late 2020, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report that found no statistically significant difference by race between criminal activity and arrest — in other words, you get arrested in America if you are reported to have committed a crime, no matter your race. Multiple studies, from Harvard’s Roland Fryer to professor Peter Moskos of John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University New York, show that police officers are less likely to kill black Americans than white Americans in similar circumstances.
But to ask for evidence of systemic racism beyond mere inequality of outcome is to be complicit in systemic racism, according to the circular logic of systemic racism. Any incident of white-cop-on-black-suspect violence must be chalked up to the racist system; the evidence of the racist system is the presence of such violence in the first place; to deny that race lies at the root of such incidents makes you a cog in the racist system. The circular logic, protected by an enormous so-called Kafka trap — in which protestations of innocence are treated as proof of guilt — means that systemic racism is subject to no falsification.
And that’s precisely the point. Systemic racism is a fundamentalist religious belief. It posits original sin; it posits saints and prophets; it posits its own malevolent god of the gaps. Most of all, it persecutes heretics in the name of a supposedly higher good. To be saved is to declare fealty to radical racial polarization; to be damned is to deny such fealty.
Ben Shapiro, 36, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps,” “The Right Side of History” and “Bullies.” To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The Democrats have things like systemic racism as their god. That is why the Democrats are Godless and the Democrats / communists are the devil.
AND SINCE THE LEFT controls the trappings OF society in most all of these cities, from the entire govt, to the entire police force, to the schools, to the media and tech companies, IF its “SYSTEMICALLY RACIST’, then that MUST MEAN THEY ARE the systemic racists!
This world and this country would be a much better place had George Floyd and Derek Chauvin never been born. Now, if only the Liberal race baiting media that created this circus managed to get aborted, America might just become a livable place again. Both cases are proof positive that Liberal proffered American Family planning has not worked well to the benefit of our nation at all, like it did when God was the decider, not the rabid American media where man bites dog and man bites himself more often than white cops shoot black victims on drugs destined for a self-chosen pathway to suicide by Cop, and like the picture above soon becomes a trip to the twilight zone and the twilight years of a waning once great nation that once left unity and prosperity in its wake with the concept of individual opportunity to rise and fall on one’s merits, now degenerated into a rise and fall based upon one’s skin color, and the tribe or party he chooses to join to validate any imagined untried truth that always fails upon empirical social experimentation. The only thing systemic about our current American racism, lies only within the hearts of those obsessed with the human stem cells that determine skin color whose comfort zones rely only upon choosing race over reason.
Why should chauvin never have been born?
To be candid, he chose his own demise by starring on candid camera.
Systemic racism is a fundamentalist religious belief.
Nuff said.
Doesn’t matter if your religions is Christian, Judaism Islam, Democratic, Republican, or what ever other organization that is followed with zeal.
There is systematic racism in the Democratic party against white Conservative men and women. Example passing law to help only people of color. Black farmers with help when all farmers need help. Hate charged should be applied to both races
Chauvin should not even have been charged, much less tried for following procedure and doing his job. He killed no one. He was railroaded by a mob of useless idiots and the anarchists prodding them…
IF any charge should have been levied, it should have been NEGLIGENCE leading to someone’s death.. WHICH IS NOT EVEN MANSLAUGHTER.