Recently a North Carolina NAACP official stated, “Many black people who become police officers become blue, not black. In order for you to survive in a police department, you take on the police department’s ideology, ways of life, and culture.” She even implies that black cops are not people.
It’s a sentiment that unfortunately has gained traction in the black community.
That racist statement is best understood within the context of the NAACP’s 2016 mission: to preserve Black Lives Matter’s false narrative about systemic racism in policing, above any and all other concerns. This isn’t just by accident; the lies about systemic racism in policing—and as a black law-enforcement administrator, I can state these are unequivocally false—are purposefully crafted and calculated with a political aim.
{mosads}Shame on this once proud organization. They have dwindled into one of the most irrelevant brands in the United States. Even the name is outdated. The Advancement of Colored People? They have sold out their original mission of freedom for blacks and instead have become slaves to a new master, the Democrat Party. The NAACP is so desperate to provide cover for the progressive’s favorite dog-whistle, “racism,” it has now completed its journey from being a voice for the black community to essentially being the National Association for the Advancement of Caucasian Progressivism. (I considered but rejected the following other C words: Conniving, Calculated, Condescending, Catastrophic, Corrupt.
The Black Lives Matter (read: progressive) narrative that the NAACP serves and protects rests upon fooling the nation into believing that all police are racist, that the system is racist, that every police shooting is race-related, and that we exist within an all-encompassing prism (read: prison) where race explains every action.
What these entities seek, which is enabled by players like the NAACP, is an America defined by fear, division, a decay of the institutions that made America great, and a disregard for truth. In pursuit of this aim, the Democrat Party uses the NAACP as a gatekeeper in keeping black kids shackled to failing K-12 public schools in ghettos.
Look no further for evidence of the NAACP’s abandonment of its charter than its Twitter account, consumed with retweeting global warming tweets and nothing in defense of the honorable black policemen and women who are out there bringing law and order to the black community.
The NAACP should take note: Blacks do not care about global warming or contriving racist explanations where they don’t apply. They want real jobs, better schools and safer neighborhoods than they currently enjoy.
I challenge the NAACP to tell us the last significant policy change on behalf of civil rights in which they were instrumental. It was 1954 in the landmark case “Brown vs. the Board of Education,” which desegregated schools. That is it; nothing since. Ironically, K-12 public schools in urban ghettos have returned to providing inferior education and are back to being re-segregated.
In abandoning the true needs of the black community (starting with ensuring the protection and justice of law enforcement is supported, not undermined), the NAACP embraces falsehoods, division, and racism—so long as they support the Democrat Party platform.
The NAACP has become such an embarrassment that they honored former Los Angeles Clippers admitted racist owner Donald Sterling with their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014 and nominated him for the award again before his racist rant tape recording was discovered.
The NAACP, as is revealed through this statement about police, as well as in countless other ways, is dehumanizing police officers in much the same way white racists of the slavery and Jim Crow era did to blacks. Blacks were seen as subhuman. Instead of fighting this narrative, the NAACP chooses the spray-on tan of white activists Shawn King and Rachel Dolezal while paying only lip service to the plight of blacks in our nation’s ghettos.
Who is the NAACP, given this track record, to stand in judgment of anyone—most of all, police officers? By suggesting that policemen and women cannot be black and serve in the police force, the NAACP shows just how racist progressives have become. And by abandoning the black law enforcement officers who could use their support right now, the NAACP shows just whom they serve, and it isn’t the black community.
Clarke is the Milwaukee County sheriff and the author of “Cop Under Fire: Moving Beyond Hashtags of Race, Crime and Politics for a Better America.” Follow him @SheriffClarke
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