What are the fruits of propaganda, of playing the woke racial-grievance card? Here’s one consequence:
Most black Americans today, a new study has found, believe in racial conspiracy theories — i.e., that U.S. institutions were designed to hold them back.
What’s more, the entity conducting the study, the normally sober Pew Research Center, descended into wokeness when reporting the results.
Black Americans certainly aren’t alone in distrusting our institutions. To use a term coined by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, we’re now in a “third turning” phase, a phenomenon whereby a people loses faith in its civilization’s institutions; a 2023 Gallup study bore this out, too, finding that trust in American institutions is now historically low.
Yet most black Americans believe something different still: that our institutions are out to get them in particular. This is despite the fact that many blacks view themselves as at least fairly successful and feel optimism regarding their financial future, relates Pew.
As for its study, the organization “conducted a survey of 4,736 Black adults in the U.S. from Sept. 12 to 24, 2023” to measure prevalence of “narratives of mistrust.” The basic findings are below, with each one in quotation marks and followed by perspective-lending commentary.
“76% of Black adults say Black public officials today are singled out to be discredited in a way that doesn’t happen to White public officials.”
Is there an example of this? Whites are held to a higher social standard than blacks today; they’re canceled for saying and doing things that non-whites routinely get a pass for. Liberal comedian/commentator Bill Maher noted this on his podcast recently when, after black guest Larry Gilmore quipped that he just views “all white people as problematic,” Maher pointed out that he, as a white man, could never make such a statement about blacks.
As for public officials in particular, who has been more singled out for discrediting than white Donald Trump?
“76% say police today do very little to stop guns and drugs from flooding Black communities.”
The problem is that when cops do police more aggressively — as happened with great success in NYC under the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations — they’re impugned and accused of targeting minorities. This leads to “de-policing.”
“74% say Black people are more likely than White people to be incarcerated because prisons want to make money on the backs of Black people today.”
In a way, this contradicts the previously quoted belief. Real efforts to “stop guns and drugs from flooding black communities” absolutely would mean arresting and incarcerating more black criminals. You can’t have one without the other.
Crime is rife in black communities, too. For example, approximately 50 percent of all homicides are committed by blacks (14 percent of the population). The victims are usually black, too.
“67% of Black Americans say businesses today target marketing of luxury products to Black people in order to put them into debt.”
Obviously, manufacturers target any market that can make them money. In fact, the group most targeted is women — because they drive 70 to 80 percent of buying decisions.
“55% of Black adults say secret and nonconsensual medical experiments (like the Tuskegee study) are happening to Black people today.”
Some would say that the Covid shots constituted an experiment on all humanity. But a medical experiment specifically targeting black people today? Example, please.
“55% of Black adults say the government today encourages single motherhood and the elimination of Black men from Black families.”
Liberal government policies certainly do exacerbate the above problems. Yet is man just an “economic being,” at economic forces’ mercy? Consider that Hasidic Jews historically have received much “public assistance,” such as welfare, food stamps, and subsidized housing. Yet they still manage to maintain intact families. Note, too, that black single motherhood is a problem transcending the United States. To wit: “Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest percentage of single mothers worldwide,” reported Gallup in 2020.
“51% of Black adults say the government promotes birth control and abortion to reduce the size of the Black population, and this is happening today.”
Family size is directly related to religious belief, with devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims of every race having high fertility rates. And all these groups, do note, must contend with our modern-day culture of death.
Unfortunately, perspective is lacking today because the “woke” racial narrative prevails. And deviating from its usual scientific presentation style, Pew contributes to this problem with its study.
For example, no doubt having received politically correct pushback, Pew changed its report’s title and inserted an apologetic “Editorial note” post-publication; it related that, among other things, “new ‘explainer’ paragraphs” were added to the report.
Pew also uses deceptive, selectively presented statistics to justify the racial paranoia its study found, writing that several “studies show that [white/black] racial disparities in income, wealth, education, imprisonment and health outcomes persist to this day.”
This is the standard narrative. Virtually unmentioned, however, is that these disparities also exist between Asians and whites — favoring the former. Asians have higher incomes, greater wealth, better educational outcomes, lower imprisonment rates, and better health than do whites. “White privilege”?
In the final analysis, an interesting modern phenomenon tells the tale about today’s prevailing racial bias. Not only have we heard numerous high-profile stories about white people trying to “pass” as non-white, but more than a third of “white students who applied to colleges falsely claimed they were a racial minority on their application,” reported The Hill in 2021.
In contrast, there are no black people trying to pass as white today. So with actions speaking louder than words, question: What does this say about who’s really targeted with contemporary institutional bias?