On December 18th of last year, The Colbert Report signed off. Nine years of reporting at people from the gut. Because as he explained on his first show, when he introduced The Word “Truthiness” to the world, “The truthiness is, anyone can read the news to you; I promise to feel the news at you.”
As it turned out, Colbert was only playing a character, satirizing the prevalence of opinion journalism in today’s media where journalists don’t report the news as much as inform their audience what they feel the news is really about. In reality, Colbert was making the point that you can’t use feeling as a basis for policy. Feelings can be misleading.
People feel afraid of household spiders. They want to crush and flush them, but the reality is spiders are beneficial. They eat disease-ridden bugs, like mosquitoes and bed bugs, and pests that destroy crops. In fact, if we got rid of all of the spiders, we would quickly fall into a devastating famine that would threaten the very existence of the human race. So while we may feel afraid of spiders and feel it necessary to kill them, they’re actually there helping us. And that's a rule which can be applied further. For instance, to the Police.
But that’s part of a conversation we’re about to have. At least that’s what everyone keeps saying. That we need to have this conversation. Though, we’re still waiting for it to begin. People are talking, yelling and chanting from all sides, but no one seems to be listening to the other. Yet, somehow, one side has managed to reach their conclusion.
The protesters in New York have demanded the job of NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and an end to the “Broken Windows” policy, in which Police target small crimes in order to curtail an atmosphere where bigger crime can thrive. A policy which protesters feel endangers their lives. But just because they feel it, doesn’t make it true.
Mayor de Blasio himself just last month stood up at a press conference to announce that crime in New York City, under this policy, is down to more-than-decade-long lows. In Newark, one of the most crime infested cities in the country, the “Broken Windows” policy was implemented by now-New Jersey Senator, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker and crime dropped. In 2010, the mid-point of Sen. Booker’s Newark reign, the city experienced its first murder-free month in more than forty years.
Yes, feelings are real, but the facts bear out reality. And the facts are that the Police make neighborhoods, especially dangerous neighborhoods, safer. So now, with protesters demanding the end of a productive policy and the removal of a Commissioner who has been at it since before most of these protesters were born, and with chants dedicated to men who didn’t deserve to die but whose last acts on earth were criminal, it feels like the protesters aren’t fighting for inherent rights, but for the right to commit crime.
But that’s only a feeling. And I’ll allow for it be wrong- In fact, I’m sure it will be proven to be so, once we get into the conversation and find the facts that do that. So where do we start?
We could start with Police arresting minorities at a far greater rate than white people. But it wouldn’t be a complete picture without mentioning that minorities are caught committing more crimes, so maybe we should start there. But then why are Police in minority neighborhoods more to make those arrests? Is it only because minorities neighborhoods provide more opportunity to fill a quota of a rigged system? But that still doesn’t account for the reason why minority communities provide that opportunity, which seems to set off the entire cycle. So maybe we should start there.
Or maybe we should go further back. 152 years back. To New Year’s Day in the year 1863. The day President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the first of the slaves from that day and henceforward.
Now, President Lincoln’s Proclamation didn’t end racism in this country. It didn’t even entirely end slavery. The struggle continued for many, many years. The War itself didn’t end for two more years. Then there were the fights for equality: To own land. To work. To get educated. To vote. To sit on a bus. To be a person. Heck, the struggle continues now. It’s a struggle that should never have been necessary, but one that has proven to be immensely valuable and worthwhile, and it was only made possible by that Proclamation and the millions of Americans who conspired to make it happen. But sometimes it feels like whenever there’s a conversation on race in this country, it carries the undertone, sometimes even an overtone, that this is a nation with slavery and racism at its core. A tone that ignores the Emancipation Proclamation and the fact that hundreds of thousands of American men died fighting to meet its purpose. And when they’re sacrifice is washed over, it feels like those men died in vain.
But the fact is those men fought and died for something. And it wasn’t to conquer land, for self preservation, or even to win a voting bloc. It was for the North. For the Union. For freedom. Because they knew a Truth. A Truth which was self evident, that all men are created equal and with rights. Among them: liberty. The same Truth that less than one hundred years prior, Americans, in their own name, fought and died for. And it’s that Truth which set the slaves free. Because that’s what the truth does.
Yes, there was slavery in this country. Yes, America profited from it. And yes, there is racism in this country today, but it’s not the core of this country. Freedom and equality is the core. That’s the truth which the facts bear out. The lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought for the rights of African men and women prove it. And that truth, and not some truthiness version of it, must now set us free from the deep-seeded resentment which has infected every conversation this country has ever tried to have on race. And it is only from that place where we must start and finish the last conversation we should ever have to have on the subject.
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