Our obsession with racism has made us paranoid

We are told racism is everywhere, so some now see racism even where none exists. It’s the logical conclusion to a culture that tells people that essentially every single thing in this country, including math, bird-watching, and food, is racist or has racist roots. When everything is supposedly racist, people are going to see racist symbols and hear racist slurs where there are none.

Consider, for example, what happened this weekend during a game between the Colorado Rockies and the Miami Marlins.

Activists, journalists, and even entire newsrooms were convinced after a brief video circulated on social media that a white fan screamed the N-word from behind home plate. USA Today baseball columnist Bob Nightengale even called for the fan to be arrested and barred from ever attending “a sporting event, let alone anything else.”

However, the Colorado Rockies concluded later that the fan actually yelled the name of the team’s mascot, Dinger.

Of course, the fan yelled something like “Dinger!” Do you really suppose a fan was just out there screaming the N-word and that no one around him reacted or attempted to correct him? Or is it more likely he was yelling something else, which gave no offense to anyone within earshot? That journalists and activists sincerely believed it was the former, and never even paused to consider whether it was the latter, is par for the course for the race-panic in which we are living. They couldn’t even conceive of a scenario in which they misunderstood the fan and that something else may have been said during the game.

There are so many examples of similar incidents in which people mistake something perfectly innocent for a brazen act of racism that it’d probably take too long to compile them all. But here are just a few recent examples:

In 2020, Oakland residents, including even the mayor, were convinced racist vandals had put up a series of nooses in a public park. Later, after a black resident explained he and his friends put the ropes up as part of an exercise system for the benefit and enjoyment of parkgoers, the mayor insisted that the intent didn’t matter. The ropes still looked pretty racist, she said.

“Intentions don’t matter when it comes to terrorizing the public,” the white mayor said. “It is incumbent on all of us to know the actual history of racial violence, of terrorism, that a noose represents and that we as a city must remove these terrorizing symbols from the public view.”

That same year, CBS News falsely accused firefighters of flashing a supposed white supremacist hand while posing for a group photo. In reality, the firefighters were simply playing the “circle game,” an old schoolyard pastime in which a person makes a circle with his thumb and index finger and then punches whomever he tricks into looking at it.

In 2019, major newsrooms, including the New York Times and NBC, accused United States Military Academy cadets of likewise flashing the supposedly racist “OK” hand sign. Similar to the firefighters, the cadets were simply playing the “circle game.”

Earlier, in 2017, comedian Sarah Silverman had a mini panic attack after she saw what she believed was a swastika spray-painted on the sidewalk. As it turns out, it was just construction markings designating the location of underground pipes and wires. The markings didn’t even look like a swastika!

It never occurred to these people that the things they saw were actually innocent. It never occurred to them there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation. Rather, their first instinct was to allege wrongdoing by a shadowy cabal of racist vandals, who apparently roam the county either quietly or loudly proclaiming their racist allegiance.

When you’re told repeatedly that the very foundations of this country are racist, that its founders are irredeemable racists, and that everything that you have is because of racism, then it only stands to reason that otherwise sane and reasonable people will see racism everywhere — even where none exists.