Friday, May 27, 2022

(RE)IMAGINE

(RE)IMAGINE

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BARACK OBAMACRIMEPOLICING

Barack Obama remembers George Floyd on the second anniversary of his passing (tweet below). He doesn’t want to let our current focus on the Uvalde massacre distract us from attention to the anniversary and the shibboleth of “reimagining policing.”

Obama puts me in mind of John Lennon: “Reimagine there’s no police. It’s easy if you try.” If you visit Minneapolis, by the way, you won’t have to do much in the way of imagining no police. No police is more or less the situation.

President Biden held an executive-order signing ceremony yesterday in connection with the anniversary. Representatives of Floyd’s family and others were in attendance. The White House has posted the transcript of his (and Vice President Harris’s) remarks here. Biden struggled with the teleprompter and recalled great days of yore:

Two summers ago, in the middle of a pandemic, we saw protests across the nation the likes of which you hadn’t seen since the 1960s.

They unified people of every race and generation. Athletes and sports leagues boycotted and postponed games. Companies and workers proclaimed “Black Lives Matter.” Students staged solidarity walkouts.

Wasn’t it grand? He forgot the rioting, looting, and burning, but otherwise perfect.

Biden is following in Obama’s footsteps. As president, Obama plowed new ground in the disparagement of law enforcement and the promotion of bad causes. Obama is still working the Trayvon Martin beat. He is talking up Black Lives Matter and “police violence.” Click on the link he thoughtfully provides to find “Clinicians of color.”

If Obama has the fever, I think Heather Mac Donald has the cure. Let us lead off with Mac Donald’s Washington Free Beacon column “Obama’s Ferguson sell-out” (2016). See also:

• Mac Donald’s current City Journal essay “Using tragedy for racial purposes” (2022).

• Mac Donald’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in response to the Oversight Hearing on Policing Practices: “Repudiate the anti-police narrative” (2020).

• Mac Donald’s Imprimis essay “The dangers of the Black Lives Matter movement” (2016).

• Mac Donald’s City Journal essay “Is the criminal justice system racist?” (2008).

• I drew on MacDonald’s 2008 essay in my own critique of Michelle Alexander’s unjustly praised but highly influential book The New Jim Crow.

George Floyd’s death or killing stays with us to this day, to be sure, but not in the sense Obama means. Rather, it stays with us in the nonsense and consequences.

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