We Have a Moral Divide, Not a Racial One

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As we await protests and riots scheduled for Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere if a grand jury in Missouri does not indict the white officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, a little moral clarity is called for.

For decades now, we have been told that there is a black-white divide in America. The problem with this belief that is that it renders moral judgment — of white police, of black crime and black incarceration rates, of white judges and jurors, and of black riots and protests – impossible.

It is, we are told over and over, all about “perceptions” — a “black-white divide” in the way each race perceives racial matters. This is how it works:

Many blacks see racism almost everywhere — especially in arrest, conviction and incarceration rates, and in white police interactions with blacks. On the other hand, whites (specifically, whites who are not on the left) think that white racism has largely been conquered, and therefore blacks’ disproportionately high arrest and conviction rates are the result of black behavior, particularly the high out-of-wedlock birth rate that has deprived the great majority of black children of fathers, not white racism.

According to the “black-white divide” way of thinking, these are simply two conflicting perceptions.

It is difficult to overstate how damaging this is.

It denies the very existence of the two pillars of civilization — objective truth and moral truth.

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