UW-Madison students call for removal of Lincoln statue

[The Magistrate]

50. To No Good End, Sir

That is the problem with this sort of thing. Paradigm shifts do not occur until a great mass of the people are in a mood for them.

We are actually in the middle of one, on the subject of policing and the racism built into current policing practices. That far, it seems clear, a great many people are ready and willing to go.

It is a mistake, however, to view this as a revolutionary moment, as some among the activist and academic left seem to do. People are angered and repulsed at murders by police, and open to the truth these illustrate, that policing in this country is practiced along racist lines, and often by people actively moved by race hated. They are not ready to denounce and denigrate icons from the nation's past, and will repudiate with some heat attempts to get them to do so. Failure to recognize this runs a real risk of doing harm to the prospects for reforming, even restructuring, policing, which people are open to. If this becomes identified in the popular mind with removal or toppling of revered national icons, a good many people will not wish to range themselves alongside such actions, and the mass support available at present for real improvements in policing will ebb, and the moment will pass with little or nothing real achieved. Indeed, there are powerful interests who want this moment to ebb away without good result, and they will batten onto the sort of thing this student advocates as a weapon they may use to achieve their aims.