The Carroll Standard

“America The Racist”: The Left’s Familiar Refrain

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(John Perazzo | Front Page Magazine) -- When Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, was recently released from Florida’s Seminole County Jail on a $1 million bail arrangement, Al Sharpton—the same man who helped foment the deadly 1991 Crown Heights riots and the the deadly 1995 boycott of a Harlem clothing store—felt compelled to condemn Zimmerman for allegedly showing “no remorse over the loss of human life.” From the moment the Martin shooting became a headline story, to be sure, Sharpton and a host of other leftists nationwide have weighed in with their thoughts about the case and its overall significance.

Among the most noteworthy of these individuals is a 40-year-old Indiana University history professor —Khalil Gibran Muhammad—who is by no means a household name. But his reflections on the Martin case illuminate, with uncommon clarity, the very heart of the Left’s bedrock beliefs regarding racism in America.

Asserting that “we all share a little bit of George Zimmerman in our relationship to young black men,” Dr. Muhammad says that to “think and talk about African-Americans as criminals is encoded in our cultural DNA.” Viewing racism as the very cornerstone of Western civilization, Muhammad derides Thomas Jefferson and his fellow American founders as men who “failed miserably” at the task of “building what would become American democracy.” The founders’ belief in the “racial inferiority” of blacks, says Muhammad, has filtered its way through all subsequent generations of Americans and into the collective consciousness of present-day whites. That inherited mindset, Muhammad explains, underpins not only the unfounded paranoia that supposedly caused an armed George Zimmerman to follow Trayvon Martin on that fateful night last February, but also all contemporary policies that use “punitive methods based on distrust”—such as police stop-and-frisk practices—to fight crime in black communities. ... continues...