My great-uncle was killed in a shootout with police.
It was devastating to our family.
When people talk about the anguish of losing a family member in a confrontation with the
authorities—well, I get that.
When people are highly suspicious of the circumstances… when they just can’t bring themselves to
believe their loved one did something that would justify what happened… when their
minds turn to conspiracies and police wrong-doing… that’s a normal human reaction to tragedy.
But, no matter how much we empathize, we as a society must look at each case and ask:
What really happened?
You can look to the facts, or you can be “Politically Correct.”
Most people think political correctness is just an effort to avoid giving offense, and
that the worst it can do is stifle debate.
It’s true that it does that, but in fact Political Correctness is much more sinister:
it’s a form of deception.
The term has its origin among Communists, who believed that truth was whatever served
the cause of the party and its patron, the Soviet Union.
Pravda—translation: Truth—was, you may recall, the name of the Communist Party’s
official newspaper in the Soviet Union.
Everyone knew the paper was full of lies, yet, in the Communist sense, it was indeed
truthful.
It told the tales that advanced The Cause.
Let’s take a look at one of the worst practitioners of political correctness in recent history:
Al Sharpton.
“The Reverend Al” became a national figure in 1987, after Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old
African-American girl, was discovered in a garbage bag, smeared in feces and with racial
epithets written on her body in charcoal.
Brawley claimed to have been raped by six white men, some of whom were police officers.
Sharpton led protests and accused several individuals of involvement in the crime, including
a prosecutor.
He called New York Governor Mario Cuomo a “racist” and compared state Attorney General
Robert Abrams to Hitler.
Brawley’s supporters suggested that the Mafia, the KKK, and the Irish Republican Army
may have been involved.
A grand jury looked at 250 exhibits and heard from 180 witnesses—more than 6,000 pages
of testimony—and concluded that the whole thing was a hoax.
Brawley had apparently written the epithets on herself, upside-down, and smeared herself
with waste from a neighbor’s dog.
Nobody knows for sure how the story got started, but, apparently, Brawley had defied her stepfather
to see her boyfriend, and was afraid of being punished by her stepfather, who had killed
his first wife.
Then, as the story gathered momentum, there was money to be had from lawsuits—her mother
later declared, “We should be millionaires!”…
…Plus, there’s the fame and other rewards that often fall upon a supposed victim whose
story advances a political cause.
Despite the evidence, Sharpton continued to push the story.
This is what Political Correctness looks like.
It doesn’t matter if the facts are true so long as the narrative is “important.”
In 1990, Sharpton supported a boycott of Korean-owned groceries in Brooklyn.
During the boycott, a teenager smashed an Asian-American man's skull with a claw hammer,
while on-lookers chanted, "Koreans go home!"
The man was actually Vietnamese.
Later, after a Hassidic Jew accidentally killed a black child in a car accident, Sharpton
spoke at the child's.
He said that “diamond merchants” had “blood of innocent babies” on their hands.
And, quote, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back
and come over to my house.”
In the riots inspired by Sharpton, 43 civilians and 152 police officers were injured, and
a rabbinical student died, with rioters chanting, "Kill the Jew!"
Then there was Freddy’s Fashion Mart.
Its landlord, who was black, raised the rent, and Freddy's passed along the rent increase
to a black-owned music store.
Sharpton called it racism, attacking the quote "white interloper."
Protesters, inspired by Sharpton, yelled, “Burn down the Jew store.”
One of the protesters then shot four employees of Freddy’s and set the store on fire.
Finally, there’s what happened in Ferguson, Missouri.
The facts are that Michael Brown, age 18, robbed a convenience store; he roughed up
an Indian-American store clerk half his size and walked away.
Some ten minutes later, Brown was confronted by a police officer, Darren Wilson, who was
on the lookout for the robbery suspect.
Brown assaulted Wilson and attempted to take the officers’ gun, which discharged inside
the police car.
Brown, 6’4” and almost 300 pounds, ran, then turned around and charged the officer.
Following an investigation by the Obama Justice Department, the police officer was found to
have been entirely justified in shooting Brown.
The Justice Department examined all the witnesses, and those whose stories stood up to scrutiny—
all African-American—all backed up Wilson’s version of events.
Yet the tale spread that Brown was shot while holding up his hands in surrender, a story
that originated with Brown’s accomplice in the robbery, who was running away and didn’t
even actually see the fatal shot fired.
Sharpton decided to get involved.
He and his associates turned the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture into a symbol
for alleged police abuses; it appeared in that context on national magazine covers,
was replicated by performers at the Grammy Awards, was seen at Democratic Party meetings
and countless protests, and became part of the national culture.
Sharpton’s reaction, ignoring the facts of the case, helped to stir up anti-police
sentiment.
Two St. Louis-area police officers were shot in revenge for Brown’s death, but survived.
In New York City, two police officers were shot to death in revenge for the Ferguson
incident and for the death of Eric Garner.
In Houston, a sheriff’s deputy was shot execution-style while pumping gas.
Five officers, killed in Dallas.
Baton Rouge: six officers shot, three of whom died.
Overall, in the first half of 2016, the number of police officers shot and killed,
up 44 percent.
Today, despite all the lies, Sharpton is a major, respected figure in American politics.
He has a show on MSNBC.
Democratic presidential candidates are expected to campaign at his church.
The current and previous attorneys general have spoken at his events… as have Bernie
Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama.
The magazine Politico declared Sharpton quote, “Obama's go-to man on race.”
Let’s be clear.
There was a time when police were sometimes the enemies of African-Americans.
Black men in the South were framed for crimes, so that they could be used as prison labor.
Basically, that was an attempt to reconstitute slavery.
There were police officers like “Itchy Trigger Finger” Nash in Georgia, who got an award
from the KKK for killing blacks.
And there were the officers in Mississippi who helped murder civil rights workers Schwerner,
Goodman, and Chaney.
Unfortunately, I could go on and on.
Suspicion of police in the African-American community is completely understandable.
But today the percentage of police shooting deaths of African-Americans is lower than
the percentage of murders committed by African-Americans… and lower than the percentage of African-Americans
who are murder victims.
Four recent studies support the belief that, in similar situations, police are now less
likely to shoot or use lethal violence against an African-American compared to someone in
a different group.
Again, with what happened in my family, I take the issue very seriously.
My heart breaks for anyone who loses a loved one that way.
However…
As a journalist and a citizen, I want the narrative determined by the facts, never the
other way around.
When a PC narrative becomes the primary method of viewing the world, it can lead to dangerous
false judgments of innocent people… and lots of violence.
Al Sharpton has demonstrated for us how this happens time and time again.