The street fight over “racism” between Rep. Elijah Cummings of Baltimore and President Trump reminds us that all political traumas eventually fade from memory to become an abstraction. Last weekend, when Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York proposed a Canyon of Heroes parade honoring 9/11 first responders, it struck me as grandstanding. Then the thought occurred: Why not? That awful day was 18 years ago, and it’s already drifting into the fog of history. Some people visit Civil War battlefields or World War I cemeteries in France and Belgium to revive a palpable sense of that incredible carnage. So one has to wonder: What is it with the constant claims and charges of racism these days? Is it to remind us of the real and violent racism that existed before Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil-rights movement in the 1960s?
Or would it be truer to say that 55 years after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racism is being pushed into the realm of abstraction, reduced mainly to use as a weapon of political rhetoric?
If one happened to be alive at the time, the reality of the urban riots in the 1960s sits forever in the mind’s eye as one of America’s most unforgettable traumas. Merely mention “the Watts riot” or “the Hough riots,” and there’s hardly a person living then who doesn’t know you’re talking about the burning, rage and destruction that engulfed African-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Cleveland, Newark, Detroit and many other cities. After King’s assassination in 1968, horrific inner-city riots broke out in New York, Washington, Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Trenton, N.J. For much of the U.S. population born since then, those events have about as much immediacy as a World War II documentary.Still, political control of virtually all these cities has remained in the hands of the Democratic Party. Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis have had nothing but Democratic mayors since then.New York has had several Republican mayors, though the chances of another ever winning election are about zero. As elsewhere, the city’s politics is so noncompetitive that most of New York’s Democrats don’t even bother to vote. When Bill de Blasio was first elected in 2013, turnout was 26% of registered voters, a record low.That suits the keepers of America’s sterile status quo in its most rundown neighborhoods just fine. Urban Democrats are now in a destructive co-dependent relationship with public-sector unions. Inner-city residents have become an afterthought.Walking past a public-housing complex in lower Manhattan recently, I noticed the date on the cornerstone: 1963. That is about when these projects were erected all over the U.S. They, like so much urban infrastructure, are falling apart through neglect because city budgets are consumed by labor costs. Public schools in every city mentioned in this column are failing to educate black American children adequately because the teachers unions won’t permit reform.According to recent FBI data, the most violent cities in the U.S. include—still—St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Oakland, Calif. A 16-year-old gangbanger in Chicago today was born in 2002 or 2003, after 9/11. Stories like his, passing from innocence to ruin before reaching adulthood, have repeated themselves every 20 years in all these Democratic-controlled cities. If that’s not racism caused by political failure, the word has no meaning. Yet the press, or part of it, has been consumed the past week with Trump vs. Cummings and such irrelevant stories as “Cummings has long frustrated the president.”
During the Clinton presidency, a brief period of “moderate” reform surfaced on welfare, schools and, yes, crime, but progressives have repudiated all that, as the liberal traditionalist Joe Biden has learned.And so we return to seeking explanations for the profligate use of the word “racism” today. Here’s one: Liberals and the liberal media have internalized this embarrassing and disgraceful urban failure. They’ve moved past it. They’ve given up.After 55 years of wheel-spinning, it’s all getting abstracted into “racism.” The gentry liberals who drove up housing prices for the poor and middle class walk past the human and physical debris like 18th-century Parisian aristocrats holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses. In Queens, they sent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress to keep them entertained on Instagram.Messrs. Cummings and Trump are footnotes in this unhappy saga. The important difference is that the Baltimore congressman no longer has much to add, but Mr. Trump is president. Mr. Trump brought up the subject of Baltimore. Now he should put it and these other cities on his campaign agenda. Let the left scream racism. Everyone else in American knows the reality is deeper than that.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tru...c9BrksP6MGYX7s
