No Gods, No Cops, No Masters

[cbayer]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/01/no-gods-no-cops-no-masters.html

James Poulos
01.01.15

Left and right think the way to address racial strife is through policy. But there’s a better way—if only we had a leader up to the task.

This is the first Christmas I can remember when the news was all about cops and race. The current conflict it fuels is now poised to last long into the new year. Christians should have addressed that conflict more forcefully over the holidays. They did not, but they should do so in 2015. Our failure to extend human fellowship across the races reveals not just the limits of public policy, but the power of religion in American life.

Though this year’s uproar has been fueled by a sad string of particular incidents, it has been dominated by two abstract ideas. One blames black Americans as a race; the other, racism as a social structure. Despite their differences, both presume the only sufficient way to address “the race problem” is through political and economic policy.

Americans on the left are becoming convinced that cultural training for whites is no longer enough; on the right, Americans are growing certain that the same is true about blacks. Representing the change among self-described liberals, The Week’s Ryan Cooper suggests not only that “educating the privileged has reached a point of diminishing returns,” but that “attacking racist outcomes with structural policy can make that education unnecessary.” Meanwhile, notes Jamelle Bouie at Slate, the likes of Rudy Giuliani opine that president Obama should spend “fifteen minutes on training the [black] community to stop killing each other”—quite a laugh line, at least for those who’d lock up black America long before such “training” could ever set in.

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