By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Wikipedia calls a “sea change” a “broad transformation of thinking drawn from a phrase in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Wikipedia has its critics, but this definition is on the mark. For example, the Civil War brought about a sea change in America’s view of slavery. The fall of the Soviet Union brought about a sea change in international relations. Etc., etc.
I would argue that the widespread coverage of the Facebook video broadcast in early January of four black men and women in Chicago torturing a mentally disabled white man fits the definition as well. The video is horrific. It shows a young white man bound and gagged on the floor, huddled in a corner.
A group of black men and women beat him, kick him, and cut his hair until his scalp bleeds, force him to drink from the toilet. One of the men yells, “F*** white people. F*** Donald Trump,” demanding the bound white man repeat his words. The white man can be heard sobbing and pleading for mercy. None was given. He was found by the police disoriented and walking the streets.
What is the sea change that this video will cause? I can’t be sure, of course. I have been wrong in the past about the public’s reaction to events in the news. But it strikes me that mainstream America well may change the way it reacts to demands by social justice activists in the media and the government based on the images in this video; that they will not be as vulnerable to the charges of racism that are thrown at people who are determined to keep thugs like those in the video out of their lives.
This video makes vivid why it is not “racism” and a “lack of compassion” that leads Americans to reject many of the plans of the liberal social engineers to solve the problems of inner-city minorities. Mainstream America is not blind. It knows that building housing projects for the poor in middle-class neighborhoods and redrawing school districts to achieve greater “racial balance” require bringing large numbers of young people like the torturers in this video into their lives.
There may be some minorities inserted by the social planners into middle-class neighborhoods who will be versions of the jolly and friendly young blacks in the television situation comedies. But not all of them. Enough to matter will be like the Facebook thugs.
There is nothing racist about saying that. Middle America would react the same if the social engineers proposed that we solve the problems of Appalachia by transporting a cast of characters resembling the redneck rapists in the movie Deliverance into our children’s world. It is hard enough to raise children to be virtuous and self-disciplined in modern America. It is irrational to expect them to thrive in a school or neighborhood with thugs like those in the Facebook video an everyday presence. The Facebook video will help people work up the resolve to say that.
My guess is that the images on this video will be in the forefront of people’s minds the next time someone like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio or Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel comes up with a scheme to achieve “greater diversity” in our urban areas; that the American people will not be as susceptible to the browbeating at the hands of the progressive reformers who want everyone’s families but their own to be forced into contact with thugs like those in the video.
Adults would not voluntarily go into social settings where menacing individuals like these are a significant presence, whether we are talking about “gangsta” rappers or outlaw motorcycle gang members. It is preposterous for us to require our children to make this “sacrifice” for the greater good of society. President Obama did not require that of his daughters. Neither did Bill and Hillary Clinton require it of Chelsea.
The rational way to lessen the distance between antisocial individuals like the thugs in the video and mainstream of society — which is, of course, a serious, ongoing American societal responsibility, and one that we cannot shrug aside — is not by dragging the mainstream down to their level. After seeing this video, my hunch is that fewer people will be reluctant to say that.
Moreover, the images on this video will harden the resistance of ordinary Americans to the hypocrisy of the race hustlers, who for decades now have asked us to ignore common sense when evaluating confrontations between minorities and the police.
I am thinking, for example, of how President Obama asked us to accept that the police “acted stupidly” when they dealt with Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates when he appeared to breaking into his home; how civil rights activists expected us to believe that the “gentle giant” Michael Brown had his hands up pleading “don’t shoot” when he was shot by the police in Ferguson, Mo.
The con men have no way of throwing up a comparable smokescreen on what happened in the Facebook video. We all sat what happened. The false narratives will not work this time.
One last thing: For the first time that I can remember ordinary Americans did not sit patiently when media and civil rights activists tried to sell us the idea that what happened in this video was not a “hate crime” because the perpetrators were “not raised properly at home,” as Don Lemon of CNN charged. Lemon became a laughingstock. Maybe those who try to sell the now-familiar con job from the intelligentsia that blacks cannot be racist because they “lack political power” will meet the same fate.
Ordinary Americans saw the video, heard the angry expletives directed at “white people.” They know what they saw. Sea changes change things.
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