I've seen an argument on right-leaning sites pointing out that BLM is racist against white people.  While BLM is certainly guilty of that, the movement is actually racist in the old-fashioned, Ku Klux Klan way, as mentored through a century of life by Old Mr. Jim Crow himself.  It's racist, in other words, not so much to white people, but to the black people it claims to champion.

It takes as a first position a concept of the African-American male as without agency.  He is without impulse control, without self-restraint, with tendencies toward violence, rape, murder, and inability to conceive of consequences.  No old seg could have phrased it better.

That being the case, it implies that the police must be prepared to accept such behavior as the norm. Thus, when confronted by a clearly under-the-influence perpetrator like George Floyd, it is incumbent on them not to confront and restrain as part of the process, but to give him room and time to act out.  He can't help himself; they can.

In their ideal world, the police officers withdraw across the street and observe as Floyd rants and raves and carries on while zephyrs of fentanyl drive him into deep  tantrum at the unfairness of it all.  Eventually, he will tire himself out, come down, begin to recover his self-awareness.  At that point, a non-white officer should approach him, request his acquiescence on the legal issue, and escort him peacefully and uncuffed to the station.

That should make everyone happy, except those whose police calls went unanswered while the blues were handling Floyd with BLM-Rx TLC, and all the victims of all the young men who see the cops acting like both nannies and ninnies and decide, there being no downside, that crime is a good career move.

But what's truly radical isn't its implicit racism, vile as that might be.  Rather, it signifies a demand to change the perdurable model of American social assistance.  We've seen this model before — too often.  Perhaps it worked in the late 1940s, where under our severe influence, both Japan and Germany rebuilt themselves in our image, to our specifications, and became prosperous, democratic, and timid.  But both had in place systems of social discipline, mutual respect, and solid hierarchy that gave us a foundation upon which to build.

That has not been the case in 70 years, as failures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Middle East have shown.  They — communists, radical Islamists, whatever — didn't want to become like us — educated, largely middle-class, democratic, high-trust — but to stay as they were.  They wanted to stay who they were.

Such a direction seems also the goal sought by BLM.  They don't want to assimilate into society; they want society to assimilate to the ghetto.  They proudly demand the right to enjoy the stereotype.  They don't want to be saved; they want to be celebrated as is, au naturel.  They want to be untethered from judgment, enforcement, and consequence.

The new norm has to include the right and the space and the time for black males to act out.  It has to include fatherless families, social incoherence, gang influence, tendencies to violence.  A tolerance must be built, seems to be their secret message, to accept all such features, to define deviance away.  Welcome to one possible future.

Image: Johnny Silvercloud via Flickr (cropped).