Shelby Steele on the 1992 LA Riots. Tell me if this sounds familiar.

"For black leaders in the age of white guilt the problem was how to seize all they could get from white guilt without having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer.

With it, the smallest racial incident proved the “global truth” of systemic racism. This is why one black man being beaten by police in Los Angeles could trigger a massive riot in which some sixty people were killed.

By the terms of global racism one racist incident proved the rule of systemic racism. And the rioters themselves, having absorbed global racism as a theme of racial identity, launched a riot to the scale of systemic racism rather than to the scale of a single racist event

—assuming that Rodney King’s beating was in fact motivated by racism. The ominous billows of black smoke rising above Los Angeles—large and thick enough to dim the sun—were also meant to suggest the scale of white obligation.

The rioters said, in effect, that the rage which set this city on fire was against a systemic racism that went far beyond the police assault on one man. Systemic racism would have to be answered with systemic redress.

They served well black leadership and affirmative action beneficiaries. Black students across the country who had never suffered discrimination, much less been beaten by white police, would continue to enjoy systemic redress of affirmative action with a new sense of entitlement."