We Agree This Is Happening -- The Question Is Why

As an Aristotelian, I look for causes. We don't have a whole lot of insight for now into the "final" cause of Darrell Brooks Jr's crashing a very snazzy red Ford Escape into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade on November 21. It sounds as though he may have been fleeing another crime scene, or a fight, and it's hard not to speculate that drugs may also have been involved. But that's less important for now than the "efficient" cause, for which we have some informed insight. Brooks is

the entirely predictable product of a political- and social-media driven effort to address crime by pretending that it doesn’t exist.

To present criminals — particularly black criminals — as victims. To pay no meaningful attention to actual victims — who overwhelmingly are black themselves.

. . . Brooks, however, is a depressingly familiar type.

He had been released on nominal bail Friday after being charged Nov. 5 with domestic abuse, resisting an officer, second-degree recklessly endangering safety, disorderly conduct and felony bail-jumping.

More specifically,

Just two days before the horror on Sunday, he was released from jail on $1,000 bail following an arrest for allegedly deliberately running over the mother of his child at a gas station.

As I said yesterday, this is the effect of a national campaign sponsored most visibly by George Soros to raise the felony threshold for crimes like retail theft, elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. A recent book by John McWhorter, Woke Racism, nibbles around the edges of the problem:

"The people who are calling themselves black people saviors don't understand this, but they're hurting black people because what they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help."

At the link,

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what white people get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what black people gain by "performing" victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.

But judging from reviews, I get the impression that McWhorter, a linguistics professor, sees the issue mainly in rhetorical and linguistic terms. Rhetorical virtue signaling may be satsifying, but it isn't a perceived good that can "efficiently" cause deadly social policy, which is what we see in the Waukesha case. The virtue signaling rhetoric of wokeness is only a byproduct of the policy's "formal" cause. Elsewhere, McWhorter gets closer to the issue:

I have no doubt that Martin Luther King would have understood what I'm saying in terms of helping people who actually need help. It's not an accident that at the end of his life, he was beginning to focus more on poverty in general than on the race question.

The idea is to help people who need help. The modern idea that microaggressions and how white people feel in their heart of hearts is what we should be thinking about to me is a detour.

But what, specifically, are we detouring away from here? If virtue signaling isn't the point, what is? It looks to me as if the subtext of some of McWhorter's remarks is that the civil rights movement had effective goals and achieved partial success up to about the time of Martin Luther King's death, after which elites seized on side issues that emerged from the 1960s ghetto riots to redefine the movement's goals, placing blame on law enforcement as a means of imposing a tacit policy of resegregation and continuing to keep poor African-Americans in isolated communities sustained by destructive subsidies and misdirected social services.

This would be the "formal" cause of the Waukesha tragedy and a great deal else. McWhorter is right in saying wokeness is a distraction, but the question is the actual "formal" cause of the curent dilemma. So far, I haven't seen much insighful discussion of that.