This is from National Review Online – I've excerpted what I think are the most timely bits.
Everyone Wants an Easy Solution
… a long look at how much America is wrapped up in fights about symbols . . . and how and why many prefer those fights over ones about policies and measurable real-world effects.
You know why people are pulling down statues of Christopher Columbus, right? Because taking action to meaningfully improve the lives of Native Americans today is hard.
Getting some ropes and pulling down a statue in some downtown park or public square is easy if you have enough people and can be done in a matter of minutes or hours. Reducing the number of Native Americans living below the poverty line, the high unemployment rate on reservations, and the high rates of substance abuse; fixing the insufficient and dilapidated housing; upgrading the Indian Health Service; or improving the lower life expectancy among Native Americans . . . that would require time, sustained effort, and actually engaging with Native-American communities. No, it’s much easier to go downtown and cosplay as a Visigoth sacking Rome.
Maybe some of these people genuinely want to help and are just directing their energies in a destructive direction instead of a constructive one. But I think a lot of these people just want to smash things and to justify it to themselves and others as an action in the name of that ever-mutable nebulous concept of “social justice.” (I’m not quite sure what “social justice” is, but because it so often involves people taking the belongings of others and destroying things that don’t belong to them, I know it is distinct from “actual justice.”)
What’s the bigger problem to the Native-American community right now? Some statues in big cities, or the fact that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has turned down tribal epidemiologists’ requests for data that it’s making freely available to states?
And under the Affordable Care Act, the centers are considered public health authorities on a par with state health departments and federal agencies such as the CDC.
But Abigail Echo-Hawk, the director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, told POLITICO that the CDC has so far rebuffed the centers’ requests — telling her only that the data is nonpublic.
Somewhere in the country today, there’s a Native-American epidemiologist reacting, saying, “Wait, the United States made a promise to Native tribes and then broke that promise? Wow, who could have seen that coming?”
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You probably saw that video of hundreds of white residents of Montgomery County, Md., gathering in a park, sitting and raising their arms, and participating in a ceremony to formally renounce their white privilege. Montgomery County is the 57 percent white, extremely affluent, highly educated northern suburbs of Washington, D.C., and also home to nine of the top 20 private schools in the state. One can’t help but wonder how many in that crowd who formally renounced their white privilege then walked back to their Priuses, drove back to their spacious homes in their mostly or entirely white neighborhoods, reminded their kids to finish their homework for distance learning for their top-tier private school, and spent the evening thinking about anything other than the fact that other kids in the county have to win a literal lottery to get into the public school their parents prefer.
Sure, none of these happy suburbanites’ advantages in life really changed, but they took the symbolic step of renouncing their white privilege. [Hey, if all it takes to fix racial disparity in American society is a formal renunciation ceremony, solving this is going to be easier than we thought!]
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The world is a mess. Our problems are complicated, multifaceted, interlocking, more tangled up than the Christmas lights in the attic. Racial disparities are most visibly manifested in poverty, which is exacerbated by insufficient opportunity, which is tied into poor education systems, and aggravated by substance abuse, which increases the likelihood of violence and gangs flourishing in African-American communities, which increases the number of confrontations with police, which leads to higher rates of incarceration among African-American men, which leave lots of children without fathers in the home, and when those men are released, their criminal record makes it more difficult to get a job to support a family, which worsens the level of poverty . . .
Every solution requires trade-offs and will have unforeseen consequences. Consensus is difficult to build and delicate when it’s established, enacting a solution requires patience, determination, and willingness to adjust in face of setbacks, and bad faith actors are plentiful.
As Kevin Williamson observed, “everything looks simple when you don’t know the first thing about it.”
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