In a video produced by CBS and published on Wednesday, bestselling Critical Race Theory proponent Ibram X. Kendi, director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, declared after the conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd that real justice lies in “convicting America.”
“With today’s conviction we can now formally say that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd,” Kendi says in the video. “A Minneapolis jury convicted a police officer who knelt on the neck of a handcuffed black man in a prone position for more than nine minutes.”
Fact check: the trial proved that Chauvin did not kneel on Floyd’s neck, and that the unhealthy Floyd died of a drug overdose.
“So now what?” Kendi continues. “Chauvin is headed to jail, but is America headed to justice? Is justice convicting a police officer, or is justice convicting America?…
“It is easy to just blame individual officers like Derek Chauvin, but the problem is structural,” he adds. “The problem is historic. The problem is every single American who sees George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as dangerous rather than the policies that led to health disparities, under-resourced schools, disproportionate black poverty and unemployment, and few resources for all of us suffering from drug abuse, from mental illnesses, from despair…
“Justice is opening the door to an anti-racist future where American fear is endangered, where I no longer live in fear, where Americans no longer live in fear of me. Justice has convicted America. Now, we must put in the time transforming this nation,” Kendi concludes.
Justice would be holding individuals accountable for their actions, including blacks, who are not a monolithic demographic. It includes holding Democrats responsible for their policies that keep blacks in poverty and unemployment. It includes acknowledging that no country as done more for its black citizens and done more to ensure that all are equal before the law than the United States. It includes acknowledging that this country was one of the first worldwide to abolish slavery, and the first to declare in its very founding documents that all are created equal.
Justice would be when all Americans reject the ugly, divisive lies of race hustlers like Ibram X. Kendi.