Race

Donald Trump’s efforts to broaden his appeal to the African American community are bearing fruit. Rasmussen polling noted in early June that Trump’s approval rating among African Americans stood at 41 percent, far above the 8 percent of votes he received from that community in 2016. While approval ratings don’t necessarily translate to votes on Election Day, it mathematically would be very hard for Joe Biden to win in the key battleground states should Trump double his vote to 16 percent of African American voters. Trump’s opponents are convinced that his record as president and his response to the Black Lives Matter protests mean his popularity with black voters will go down. But the truth may well be the opposite.

The Summer Of Our Discontent is in full swing and the social guillotines — at first applied to legitimate injustice and prejudice — have now come for history itself.We watch as mobs tear down statues and monuments to the past. The destruction is supposedly performed in the name of justice, but can we seize true justice by destroying the past?American history is a fascinating and sometimes tragic tale of oppression and rebellion, injustice and progress. There is a push and a pull to it all that has led us to be the most successful and prosperous society in human history.Undoubtedly there has been much pain: but how can we know how far we’ve come if we’re not allowed to see where we’ve been?The history of black America is an exhaustive tale of overcoming.

I was a borough commander in west London and come from a long line of officers — and I can tell you that it’s fast becoming impossible to police the streets. The police are attacked on all sides. They’re told both that they’re too aggressive and too politically correct; too understanding and too intolerant. They’re required to reduce the level of violent crime on the street and yet told they’re racist if they stop and search young black men and ‘put hands in pockets’ to check for knives. As a society we can shout and scream at the police, regulate them, scrutinise them, sack a few, bring in external bosses from industry. We can try to ‘re-educate’ them and have an independent complaints system.

It is a strange habit, the American one of making talk-show hosts into preachers. There is no good reason, after all, why a comedian should be any kind of arbiter of morality or anything much else. Yet in America the court of public opinion accepts the right of the jester to preach the homily too. So it was that, in a period not short on ‘personal takes’ and celebrity messaging, one night in early June on his Late Late Show, James Corden delivered a teary monologue about race relations in America. Lots of people thought he did well, and praised Corden’s talk of ‘white guilt’ and all manner of other sins. But one phrase stood out for being especially bogus. It was a phrase that was widely quoted.

Violent left-wing activists have taken to styling themselves as antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’, though their street-fighting tactics resemble nothing so much as the Brownshirt thuggery practiced by fascists themselves. This did not stop NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson from likening these hooligans to the heroes of World War Two. On the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, while America’s cities still smoldered after days of riots and looting, Liasson took to Twitter to call the Normandy invasion the ‘biggest antifa rally in history’. Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter.

After the horrible death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, I started to grow increasingly uncomfortable by what I saw. I saw the legitimate grievances of African Americans who for too long have failed to see their lives improve. I saw virtue-signaling whites lecture the rest of us to do something. My heart grew heavy. I was told again and again that I had 'white privilege’; that America suffered from 'institutional racism’; that the original sin of slavery made the country I love so deeply flawed. I reached my boiling point as I drove my kids to meet up with friends where I shared my discomfort with the narrative being told about America. In the car, we talked about what's been happening.