Blake Deal: Trivializing genocide, insinuating intent leads to inaccuracy

It’s hard to know how to react to someone who equates being amused over communist protesters with being amused over black people getting lynched.

But this is the exact comparison Tala Deloria draws in submission to the Daily Bruin in response to my article, where I argued UCLA’s Revolution Club engaged in protests against the police due to their inflated self-image and to fulfill their emotional needs. Deloria responded by accusing me of being “callous” toward racial minorities and “lobotomized by a lack of critical thinking.” Besides these eccentric comments directed toward me, Deloria adamantly reasserts this nation’s need for a communist revolution to destroy the oppressive system of the status quo, which she claims is literally perpetrating “a slow genocide against Black and Brown people.”

Unfortunately, Deloria never responds to anything I said since I never intended to discuss supposed police bias against racial minorities. It is incredibly disingenuous for her to accuse me of being callous toward racial minorities when the point of my article was to criticize Revolution Club’s use of distorted information to justify their political rhetoric and melodramatic escapades. Deloria’s frivolous use of the word “genocide” in her article perfectly illustrates my contention that she and her club are willing to sacrifice factual accuracy in their pursuit of utopian fantasy.

To use the word “genocide” in such a cavalier manner trivializes genuine cases of genocide that have taken place throughout history. The deaths of 496 non-white people at the hands of the police over the course of an entire year and within a minority population of tens of millions of people cannot be called a genocide by any stretch of the imagination. It is not only intellectually dishonest but harmfully distorts public perception of a delicate issue.

The only authoritative or relevant definition we can give to the word “genocide” is the 1948 United Nations definition, which includes five criteria. This definition is globally recognized and stipulates that genocide refers to acts with intent to destroy a particular group, using methods including “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” along with more common methods, such as, “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Since Deloria claims the United States is perpetrating a literal genocide against blacks and Hispanics through its police force, we ought to examine whether or not her claims meet the U.N.’s criteria, which the article she cites references, but utterly misapplies.

There is no intent on the part of the police or the United States federal government to literally “destroy” racial minorities. To generalize the present situation in the United States as genocide is to submit to outrageously sensationalist propaganda and to gloss over genuine cases of genocide within our nation.

Benjamin Madley, assistant professor of Native American studies at UCLA, for example, has researched the atrocities committed against the Yuki Indians in California during 1846-1865, where the population of the Yuki Indians plummeted from about 150,000 to 30,000 at most. Madley notes this event fulfills the United Nations’ criteria for genocide and raises serious contemporary political questions, since the federal government was complicit in this atrocity. Deloria’s simplistic rhetoric would have us believe that the deaths of 258 black people or 172 Hispanic people in 2015 at the hands of the police – not all of which were unjust – is comparable to the near-death of an entire Native American nation.

The only way one can claim there is a genocide against blacks and Latinos is by arguing the United States, through the police and its laws, purposely imprisons minorities for no good reason. After all, blacks in particular are killed at a far higher rate than any other racial group. But the story is far more complicated than this. For example, Heather Mac Donald, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, notes that one reason why there is heavy policing in black neighborhoods is the high amount of violent crime that occurs in those areas:

“Disproportionately high black crime rates mean that police will be called disproportionately to minority neighborhoods in response to violent incidents. When confronting armed suspects, police will be disproportionately confronting blacks.”

Racial minorities like blacks are not arbitrarily imprisoned due to police bias or drug offenses, but for homicide, assault and other violent crimes. To ignore this is to ignore the fact that minorities, like any other group of individuals, exercise a level of autonomy and are not mere pawns of an omnipotent state. To assert all these crimes are the result of an oppressive system oversimplifies the situation and needlessly truncates other relevant factors from being incorporated into the discussion.

Describing our current state in terms of genocide only serves to unnecessarily heighten racial hostilities in an already divided nation. Organizations like UCLA’s Revolution Club and the Revolutionary Communist Party work toward increasing these hostilities through invalid definitions and misinformation in an effort to make the United States ripe for political revolution.

All who feign concern over the plight of racial minorities and yet show such shameful disregard for truth and victims of genocide throughout history both insult these victims and our intelligence. The innumerable souls killed in Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, the USSR, Mao’s China or Armenia cannot be compared to the 496 non-white deaths in 2015. Sweeping emotional appeals confuse the issues and have no place in serious public discourse.