National Public Radio is having a tough time financially. Advertising is down, and so the network has had to fire a lot of people. As recently as last Fall, NPR said it would be able to avoid layoffs, but on March 30, things had gotten so bad that CEO John Lansing announced, in a Zoom staff meeting, NPR would let go 84 employees.
That led to a contentious staff debate, with plenty of hollering and finger-pointing. When Lansing asked the employees to be more civil, some of them called him a “racist.”
What is “racist” about calling for civility? Plenty, in the eyes of some activists. “Civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful,” one person on the Zoom meeting wrote. Another posted a link from an earlier NPR program titled “When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color.” According to this analysis, “For many people of color in the United States, civility isn't so much social lubricant as it is a vehicle for containing them, preventing social mobility and preserving the status quo.” These people point to distinctly uncivil behaviors in U.S. history that advanced various causes: the Civil Rights movement, the ACT-UP AIDS demonstrations, the anti-Vietnam War protests, even Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem. In each case, it took anger, rage and distress, expressed through behavior some considered uncivil, that challenged and changed the status quo. (In fact, you can even argue that America’s founding was rooted in an uncivil act, the Revolutionary War.)
There’s much to be said about this analysis. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. But if we look at what’s happening in Oakland lately, we see uncivil behavior on a mass scale that has nothing to do with improving anything and is, in fact, degrading our quality of life. It is uncivil for parks and sidewalks to be desecrated with garbage from homeless squatters. It is uncivil for crime—petty and major--to be tolerated the way it is, and even encouraged by some politicians. It is uncivil for the people to be constantly cudgeled by race baiters, and it is uncivil to argue that White people are responsible for Black crime and poverty. It is uncivil for Pamela Price to hold that criminal behavior, particularly by people of color, will no longer result in jail time. It is uncivil for Carroll Fife to say she cares about Black landlords but not White or “Yellow” (her word) ones. It was uncivil for Sheng Thao to fire Chief Armstrong—the best police Chief we’ve had in years--because some extremists pressured her. It is uncivil of the City Council to push property owners to the brink of financial disaster because of fake “COVID” concerns.
There’s so much incivility in Oakand, it takes your breath away. And yet, if you complain about it, you’re called a racist—the same way John Lansing was when he begged his co-workers to be civil. That’s all the progressives have: accusations. Without policies that work, with no coherent vision of the future, in fact with contempt for an orderly society, they play the only thing left to them: the race card. When a plea to be “civil” results in charges of racism, you have to wonder what the woke left really wants. Incivility? Fighting in the streets? Civil disorder? More death? But why?
Steve Heimoff