It’s reckless for the left to selectively cry racism

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death last year, employers offered black workers time off to deal with the news, and UCLA suspended a professor who refused to grade his supposedly traumatized black students more leniently than their nonblack peers.

Such gestures may have been well-meaning, but they were also nonsensical and reeked of condescension. Are black psyches really this fragile, and are blacks so starved for exemplars that miscreants must be treated like martyrs? Should Floyd’s death matter more to them than the huge number of black homicides that don’t involve police? And why would people who aren’t black be any less disturbed by a video showing a police officer kneeling on the neck of a defenseless suspect for nine minutes?

The protests that followed Floyd’s death rested on two assumptions. The first is that Floyd, a career criminal and drug addict, was somehow representative of black America, which is not only false but deeply insulting. The second is that police acted out of racial animus, which has never been proven. This is what happens when racial identity becomes the centerpiece of politics and public life in a multiracial society.