Cloaking a race war

What measurements are used to determine if an individual is a racist? 

Proponents to the thinking of “everyone is a racist” such as the Black Lives Matter(BLM) movement and the media would have you believe that mainstream America seems to commonly believe, or at least in the back of their minds, that there are many racists. They would argue:  “White man/cop shoots black man. Thus, white man is racist.”

Does this statement quickly jump to a rather large conclusion? 

It seems to be a flawed conflation of correlation and causation.

{mosads}The statement, “because a white cop shot a black man, he must be a racist,” is jumping to the conclusion that the white cop is a racist. Unless he is a self-proclaimed racist or is known to regularly use racial slurs, does shooting one man always justify the conclusion that the man doing the shooting is a racist? 

What specific and measurable evidence can be provided that this man is a racist? What statistical evidence do we have in regard to how many alleged racists exist in America? 

Again by what standard do we measure whether or not someone is a racist?If the white man did this in the name of racism then yes,absolutely, that man is a racist. If there is indefensible evidence that the man is a racist, then of course, he is a racist. 

We do not have the tools and means of measuring this arbitrary designation like many Universities seem to have, however I would speculate the number of actual racists is relatively low. And even then, given that small population,how many acts of racism do these alleged racists commit each day or ever, for that matter? This is the number that should be used to determine and justify the accusations made by BLM.

When one person starts to proclaim that “everyone is a racist, and you are racist even without knowing it,” or that “all white people are racist,” other groups of people then start to echo the statement. 

This continues until eventually, as Malcom Gladwell would call it, a “tipping point” occurs.

In his book “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference,” Gladwell highlights several instances where“small think” becomes “mainstream think.” 

For example, during WWII the Nazis used the tipping point model to sell the idea of “The Final Solution.” By connecting influential groups of people Gladwell calls connectors, mavens, and salesmen with the theories of stickiness and context, a “tipping point” will occur. 

Simply put, when enough people start to declare, “everyone is racist,” the public starts to believe that everyone actually is racist. America has experienced dark times with civil rights in the past. Indeed,blatant acts of racism regularly occurred. 

Today, do we see whites parading around with fire hoses and German shepperds? What measurable amount of racism occurs today?  What do we have to argue other than “the white man is a racist?” Microaggressions maybe?

What began as a small group of people accusing anyone and everyone of racism, gained enough traction, to the point that now the average American agrees that most people are, in fact, racists. We either have it on our mind regularly or at least in the back of our mind. 

Again, we can look to the Nazis for an example of this type of thinking. The vision of the Third Reich was a world without Jews, and by building on preexisting prejudice, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was able to engineer a campaign that led to the people of Germany commonly believing that all Jews were evil.
Social psychologists would call this thinking “groupthink” or “conformity.” Especially, Polish psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch placed six actors in a room with a person who had no knowledge of the experiment and asked them to pick the card with the line that matched the controlled line. The six actors would give the obvious wrong answer until it came to the real person who would commonly conform by stating the wrong answer as well.

This is called the Asch Paradigm.

The definition of a cloaking device is one where the purpose of the transformation is to hide something so that a defined region is invisibly isolated. It is used to get past one focus by quickly jumping to another.

This article is intended to encourage its readers to critically think about this modern idea that everyone is consumed by racism. It is intended to start a conversation, not to make a statement of fact. The mission is to inspire skepticism.

Mission accomplished.

Justin Pizzulli is the former Ohio Field Director of Generation Opportunity. He is currently an MBA student attending Marshall University. 

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.