“It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you,” Joe Biden told graduates of the historical black college of Morehouse. “What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leaves black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?”
These are three of the most pernicious and divisive lies about American life.
To begin with, the notion that the only way for a black graduate to succeed in America is to stratospherically overachieve is an obvious myth. The United States isn’t a utopia for black Americans — or anyone else, for that matter. Black neighborhoods are plagued by terrible Democrat- and state-run schools, the welfare state, and other factors. There is plenty for individuals to overcome.
But most companies, schools, and institutions these days go out of their way to find nonwhite candidates to diversify their operations. According to Morehouse’s own statistics, nearly 83 percent of its graduates have a job right now or are continuing their education. The 70 percent employment rate is the same as the national average. The top 20 employers of Morehouse graduates include industry giants like Deloitte, Cigna, Google, Lockheed Martin, and AT&T. The average starting salary for a Morehouse graduate is $76,543. The average starting salary of a person with a bachelor’s degree in the United States is $68,516.
Could it be better? Yes. But if black Americans in the United States formed a nation unto themselves, they would have a higher living standard and more wealth per capita than nearly any other country in the world — including most of Europe. The contention that black Americans are systemically held back in the job market is paranoia.
Worse, Biden insinuated that the state is targeting black lives.
In 2021, a Skeptic Research Center poll found that nearly half of liberals believed approximately 1,000 unarmed black men were murdered in one year by cops. Twenty percent of conservatives agreed. Over half of people with “very liberal” political views believe 1,000 or more unarmed black men are killed by cops in a year (14 percent of them believe that number is 10,000.) Twenty-six percent of “liberals” believe it is 1,000.
Yet according to a database compiled by Mapping Police Violence, the actual number of black men, armed and unarmed, killed by the police this year (as of this writing) is 94 — almost all of them in incidents where police officers were cleared of wrongdoing.
Cops fatally shoot just over 1,000 civilians per year, almost all of them dangerous, very few of them unarmed. One innocent person is too many, but the number is nowhere near what most Democrats have been programmed to believe.
Even in the most infamous cases of police shootings against black Americans, none are proven to have a racial component — and that includes the murder of George Floyd and the “clean” shooting of Michael Brown, which had its anniversary the other day.
Again, this is not to say there aren’t racists in the world — hardly — but the perception created and fostered by the left of a nation where black men are hunted by cops is a politically expedient lie.
Perhaps the most harmful myth spread by Biden, one central to the Democrats’ messaging, is “voter suppression.” Millions of Democrats now believe the GOP systemically stops black Americans from participating in “democracy” when, aside from some isolated incidents, no such effort exists in the United States. The voter suppression myth is effective because it is always evolving and open-ended and tied to genuine historical wrongdoing. Now even the most basic voter-integrity law — showing ID, for instance — becomes Jim Crow 2.0 to the professional Democrat.
A Kaiser Family Foundation survey of black voters before the 2022 midterms found that seven in 10 said they were concerned about “voter suppression interfering with a fair and accurate election in their state.” When asked if they ever personally experienced voter suppression, only half said that “they have experienced waiting in long lines at their polling place in the past, and one in five have experienced potential voter suppression such as having their registration or identification questioned.”
Which is to say that fears of voter suppression have been so normalized that black Americans who face ordinary inconveniences — typically in blue states and Democrat-run cities — such as standing on a line or having an ID check, believe they’re victims of systemic white oppression.
It is easier to cast a ballot in the United States than ever. Easier here than anywhere else in the world. Most voters don’t even need to leave their homes to do it. In every state, they can request a ballot in the mail. You can get it in a dozen or so languages. You can get it weeks before an election. It is easier to vote than to buy virtually anything online. Anyone can do it.
So sending young people out into the world convinced that their country hates them is a deception meant to keep nonwhite Americans deferential to a single political party. Do they believe it? There are many reasons not to vote for Republicans, but none of Biden’s scaremongering stands up to scrutiny.
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