While recently walking in the meadows of public discourse, William Bennett stepped in the cow pie of truth. He mentioned that if evil, pragmatic outcomes were your only consideration, you could reduce crime by evil means. He said, “…if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” An interesting take on all this can be found here. Bennett qualified what he said in every way that a reasonable person could be expected to qualify it, but that has not stopped the howls of protest.
This is because liberals have gotten to the point (in virtually every public policy discussion) where their only possible recourse is to try to shout down the opposition. Blacks are far more likely to be incarcerated than whites. That is the simple fact, and the basis of Bennett’s hypothetical (and roundly condemned by Bennett) scenario. White racists attribute the difference in the incarceration rates to the genetic and hardwired attraction of blacks to crime. Liberals of various stripes blame various societal factors, like the “cycle of poverty” caused by society generally, and selective and prejudicial enforcement of the laws. But in that debate, both the liberals and the racists are talking about the same phenomenon, an indisputable phenomenon which it is apparently now hazardous to even mention.
The apostle Paul once mentioned a culture-wide tendency of the Cretans to certain sins, and the generalization was an apt one. But he did not surrender to his own accurate generalization, and did not think the Cretan tendency to sloth was stronger than the gospel — which is what all racists always like to think. Our problems are forgiveable (and even endearing), but the problems of that “other group” are well beyond the capacities of Jesus. But Paul did not think this way at all, and so he told Titus to rebuke them sharply so that they would be sound in the faith. Were he alive today, there would be picketers outside Paul’s office the next morning (Hey, hey, ho, ho! Pauline racism’s got to go!”), and various political and ecclesiastical dignitaries would be demanding that he apologize.
The message of the gospel for blacks is the same as the message of the gospel for whites — repent and believe the gospel. And when we do, Christ will save us from our sins, regardless of who we are. But what are we to repent of? In our various cultural situations, we are to repent of those sins which are destroying us. And the sins of welfare queens in Detroit are different than the sins of Episcolpalian sodomites in Vermont, and they certainly offer a different cultural “presentation.” But despite the differences, they have in common the fact that they are a love affair with death — as it says in Proverbs, all who hate wisdom her love death.
So when liberals demand that we not be allowed to even mention those things which are visibly destroying black people, this makes their liberal racism far more pernicious. Open racism on the part of whites is certainly contemptible, but at least it has not yet abandoned the virtue of honesty. In contrast, liberal racism pretends to love the people they are destroying, and they add to the vice of their oblique genocide the vice of hypocrisy. Not only are they effectively destroying black culture, they attempt to destroy anyone who speaks the truth about what they are doing. The president once spoke of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and the only addition I would want to make is that the consequences of such behavior are not soft at all.
One other comment. Opposing sin at this kind of high-handed level has always required courage. Denouncing sins that everyone else is denouncing (even if they really are sins) requires no courage at all. But try denouncing current sins that have an entire nation like ours by the throat. You had better be prepared to become an “enemy of all mankind.” Gospel preachers, like French generals, have constant pressure on them to fight the last war. “Let’s denounce the sins of the previous generation, and let us thunder away!” But if we are summoned bring the gospel to bear on what is currently going on, we hem and haw and say we don’t want to get “too political.” Which is what some German preachers did when they were hauling Jews away.
Black culture is being currently destroyed, in front of our very eyes, and our racially sensitive pretty boy preachers are busy preaching against separate water fountains — which don’t exist anywhere anymore. Moreover, they preach this way in the name of relevance.