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Outrage is the natural response to the brutal killing of
George Floyd. Yet outrage and clear, critical thinking seldom go hand in hand.
An act of police brutality became the catalyst for a revolutionary mood.
Protests spilled over into violence and looting. Stores were destroyed;
policemen and civilians injured and killed. The truism “black lives matter” was
joined by a senseless slogan: “Defund the police.”
Democratic
politicians—and some Republicans—hastened to appease the protesters. The mayors
of Los Angeles and New York pledged to cut their cities’ police budgets. The
Minneapolis City Council said it intended to disband the police department. The
speaker of the House and other congressional Democrats donned scarves made of
Ghanaian Kente cloth and kneeled in the Capitol. Sen. Mitt Romney joined a
march.
Corporate executives scrambled to identify their brands
with the protests. By the middle of June, according to polls, American public
opinion had been transformed from skepticism about the Black Lives Matter
movement to widespread support. Politicians, journalists and other public
figures who had denounced protests against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost
their concern about infection. One Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on June 2:
“In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to
systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”
Although I am a black African—an immigrant who came to
the U.S. freely—I am keenly aware of the hardships and miseries
African-Americans have endured for centuries. Slavery, Reconstruction,
segregation: I know the history. I know that there is still racial prejudice in
America, and that it manifests itself in the aggressive way some police
officers handle African-Americans. I know that by measures of wealth, health
and education, African-Americans remain on average closer to the bottom of
society than to the top. I know, too, that African-American communities have
been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19 and the economic disruption of
lockdowns.
Yet when I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when
I see books such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” top the bestseller list,
when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the
orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up.
“What the media also do not tell you,” I tweeted on June
9, “is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay,
trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But
our society and our systems are far from racist.”
America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle
East. There I had firsthand experience of three things. First, bloody
internecine wars between Africans—with all the combatants dark-skinned, and no
white people present. Second, the anarchy that comes when there is no police,
no law and order. Third, the severe racism (as well as sexism) of a society
such as Saudi Arabia, where de facto slavery still exists.
I came to the U.S. in 2006, having lived in the Netherlands since 1992.
Like most immigrants, I came with a confidence that in America I would be
judged on my merits rather than on the basis of racial or sexual prejudice.
There’s a reason the U.S. remains, as it has long been, the destination of
choice for would-be migrants. We know that there is almost no difference in the
unemployment rate for foreign-born and native-born workers—unlike in the European Union.
We immigrants see the downsides of American society: the expensive yet
inefficient health-care system, the shambolic public schools in poor
communities, the poverty that no welfare program can alleviate. But we also
see, as Charles Murray and J.D. Vance have shown, that these problems aren’t
unique to black America. White America is also, in Mr. Murray’s phrase, “coming
apart” socially. Broken marriages and alienated young men are problems in
Appalachia as much as in the inner cities.
If America is a chronically racist society, then why are
the “deaths of despair” studied by Anne Case and Angus Deaton so heavily
concentrated among middle-aged white Americans? Did the Covid-19 pandemic make
us forget the opioid epidemic, which has disproportionately afflicted the white
population?
This country is only 244 years old, but it may be showing
signs of age. Time was, Americans were renowned for their can-do,
problem-solving attitude. Europeans, as Alexis de Tocqueville complained, were
inclined to leave problems to central authorities in Paris or Berlin. Americans
traditionally solved problems locally, sitting together in town halls and
voluntary associations. Some of that spirit still exists, even if we now have
to meet on Zoom. But the old question—“How can we figure this out?”—is
threatened with replacement by “Why can’t the government figure this out for
us?”
The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it
out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an
obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social
problems are the basis of their power. That is why, whenever a scholar like
Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing it’s simply not true that the police
disproportionately shoot black people dead—the response is not to read the
paper but to try to discredit its author.
I have no objection to the statement “black lives matter.” But the
movement that uses that name has a sinister hostility to serious, fact-driven
discussion of the problem it purports to care about. Even more sinister is the
haste with which academic, media and business leaders abase themselves before
it. There will be no resolution of America’s many social problems if free
thought and free speech are no longer upheld in our public sphere. Without
them, honest deliberation, mutual learning and the American problem-solving
ethic are dead.
America’s elites have blundered into this mess. There were eight years of
hedonistic hubris under Bill Clinton. Then came 9/11 and for eight years the
U.S. suffered nemesis in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the financial crash. After
that we had eight years of a liberal president, and the hubris returned.
Sanctimonious politics coincided with deeply unequal economics.
Through all this, many Americans felt completely left
out—of the technology boom, of the enterprise of globalization. I never thought
I would agree with Michael Moore. But at an October 2016 event, he predicted
that Donald Trump would win: “Trump’s election is going to be the biggest
[middle finger] ever recorded in human history.” I still think that analysis
was right. Mr. Trump wasn’t elected because of his eloquence. He was elected to
convey that middle finger to those who had been smugly in charge for decades.
But you can’t give the middle finger to a pandemic, and 2020 has exposed
the limitations of Mr. Trump as a president. Yet when you look at the
alternative, you have to wonder where it would lead us. Back to the elite
hubris of the 1990s and 2010s? I can’t help thinking that another shattering
defeat might force sane center-left liberals into saying: That wasn’t a one-off; we’ve
got a real problem. They’ll be in the same position as the
British Labour Party after four years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and two
election defeats, when eventually the moderates had to throw the leftists out.
One way or another, the Democratic Party has to find a way of throwing out the
socialists who are destroying it.
The Republicans, too, have to change their ways. They
have to reconnect with young people. They have to address the concerns of
Hispanics. And they have to listen to African-Americans, who most certainly do
not want to see the police in their neighborhoods replaced by woke community
organizers.
We have barely four months to figure this out in the old American way. To
figure out how to contain Covid-19, which we haven’t yet done, because—I dare
to say it—old lives matter, too, and it is old people as well as minorities
whom this disease disproportionately kills. To figure out how to reduce violence,
because the police wouldn’t use guns so often if criminals didn’t carry them so
often. Perhaps most pressing of all, to figure out how to hold an election in
November that isn’t marred by procedural problems, allegations of abuse and
postelection tumult.
Who knows? Maybe there’s even time for the candidates to debate the
challenges we confront—not with outrage, but with the kind of critical thinking
we Americans were once famous for, which takes self-criticism as the first step
toward finding solutions.
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution.
