The View From Olympus: A Black Awakening?

A friend of mine is a Cleveland cop. He's white, and the area he serves is black. Judging from what you hear on the news, you might expect he now faces a hostile population.But exactly the opposite is the case. The blacks in his patrol area have responded to recent attacks on the police for shootings of young black males not with "rage", but with an outpouring of support for the cops. My friend told me that he and his colleagues get smiles, waves, people stopping to thank them for being there, even offers of bottles of water and invitations to come in the house on cold nights for some coffee. He said he has never seen any of this before. Some blacks have even said to him, "We know the problems isn't you, it's us."A couple dozen blacks from Ferguson, Missouri, came to Cleveland to demonstrate, march, and try to stir up the kind of violence that has burned down much of their own town. They were not well received here. When they marched through the housing projects, Cleveland blacks came out to curse them and told them to go home. The fact that some of the "peaceful" demonstrators were using bullhorns to call for killing cops may have had something to do with their reception.Seen rationally, none of this should be a surprise. Most victims of black crime are black. The honest blacks who live in the inner city need police protection more than most whites do. It's logical they should support the cops. Demonstrators from Ferguson represent violence that loots and burns black communities, not the white ones. Many of the destroyed businesses are minority owned; in Ferguson they even torched a black church. The people who live in black neighborhoods need those shops and stores. Who wants to burn down his own place?But when we look at these responses from blacks in the context of present-day politics, they are remarkable. Ordinary people have seen through the endless culturally Marxist propaganda that always portrays blacks as helpless victims and whites, especially white cops, as oppressors. What politicians and the press recognize as blacks' leaders live off this game, some quite richly. Ordinary blacks are supposed to reflect their leaders' carefully cultivated "rage." Over and over they are told that cops, especially white cops, are their enemies.In Cleveland at least, reality in beginning to defeat ideology. People are seeing through the con game. Blacks are just as capable of perceiving their interests as anyone else. The highest of all interests is safety. In Cleveland's inner city as elsewhere, safety comes from the police. They can protect honest people, black and white, more effectively when they are welcomed and supported by the community. So here at least, the black community is welcoming and supporting them.This is an awakening of potentially vast importance. It could lead to a new black politics wherein blacks themselves clean up their own communities, in cooperation with the police and whoever else is willing to help. Instead of playing the "civil rights" game where blacks' message is always the same -- "We're victims who demand you to solve our problems" -- blacks would instead turn to the message of Booker T. Washington, who called for American blacks to show that they can perform at the same level as whites and take care of themselves.The outpouring of support for our cops from Cleveland's blacks show that the base for change is there. But if it is to happen, it requires a new and very different black leadership. The new leadership must be about reality, not ideology. Its goal must be a safe and prosperous blacks community, not personal power and enrichment of the leaders. It will be difficult for such new leadership to emerge, because the white culturally Marxist Establishment will try to stop it. It is quite happy with the present situation, where blacks are a club to be used to beat whites with endless charges of "racism." But if new, realistic leadership can emerge, we might see a black awakening that would bring vast benefits to American blacks and whites alike.