More Evidence Emerges that Lefty Racial Justice is Mostly Just the Weird-Ass Beliefs of Highly-Educated White People

Actual non-white people don't seem to be very into this crap

Few people dispute that something happened in the American left in the early-to-mid 2010s. We can debate the causes and precise start dates, but, clearly, something happened. Michael Brown, #MeToo, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Racial Reckoning — these were things. Just about the only thing that the woke left and non-woke left agree on is that we did not all fall asleep watching Malcolm X and simply dream the recent period of lefty resurgence.

Though this resurgence focused mostly on identity issues, it’s never been clear that the policies deemed necessary to advance fill-in-the-blank justice actually represent the views of the groups they ostensibly help. Of course, it’s surely true that some bits of the lefty agenda are things that marginalized people want; even a clock-with-no-batteries-in-it-because-batteries-are-capitalist is right twice a day. But some cleavages have been apparent for a long time. It was clear from the jump that most Black people don’t want to defund the police. 75 percent of Latinos want more border security. Of course, it’s often hard to tell what any group of people want: Issue polling is only slightly more scientific than the Psychic Vampire Repellant that Gwyneth Paltrow sells on Goop (meanwhile, I’m over here knee-deep in non-psychic vampires — thanks for nothing Goop!). But the claim that the mostly white activists who cluster in big cities and elite institutions speak for non-white people across America was always dubious to say the least.

Evidence continues to trickle in that these activists really only speak for themselves. A major data point arrived last week from Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch: Non-white voters are moving away from Democrats.