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Again, my point isn’t that all is fine with race and policing in America. Any unjustified killing by a police officer should be condemned and prosecuted for all of the obvious reasons. And the evidence that Black people are disproportionately and unfairly singled out for traffic stops seems compelling to me.
But the narrative pushed by the media is almost allegorical when held up against reality. I lost track of the number of times reporters and interviewers said, or allowed people to get away with saying, that policing originated as “slave patrols.” Policing is thousands of years old, and while some police departments in slave states had antecedents in such patrols, those in, say, Boston and Minneapolis didn’t.
More importantly, the purpose of this talking point is to buttress an almost biblical narrative of some original sin that supposedly animates police departments today. I’d bet not one cop in 10,000 had ever heard that policing was the legacy of slave patrols until this year.
The debate over policing is just one facet of this complex problem. For instance, journalists at elite outlets often use “Latinx” to describe a diverse Hispanic or Latino population so as to avoid gendered or colonial connotations. Never mind that 98% of American Latinos told pollsters at ThinkNow Research that they don’t like, know or use the term.
This isn’t just about liberal media bias. (The right-wing media has biases, too). It reflects a tendency for American media outlets to speak to audiences that are unrepresentative of America as a whole. Why they do it can’t be reduced to a single explanation. That they do it is obvious to a lot of Americans.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
