American black people are being lied to and the lies destroy them. They are being lied to by corrupt people like Attorney General Eric Holder and Al Sharpton Jr. and Jesse Jackson and the leftists in our news media. They are being told that their poverty is due to prejudice and that the police are targeting them out of bigotry. They are being told that the dreadful existence of slum life grew out of slavery and is being perpetuated by hatred.

None of this is true. Poor black people are poor because they have no family structure and get little education. Police target them because so many more young black men are criminal thugs than young men of other colors. Women clutch their purses when a black man gets on an elevator not because they’re racist but because the statistics and the facts they have seen with their own eyes have taught them that that’s the wise thing to do. People aren’t suspicious of young black men in hoodies because people are ignorant or bigoted. They’re suspicious because reason and experience tell them that young black men in hoodies are threatening.

O. J. Simpson wasn’t innocent. Tawana Brawley wasn’t raped and neither was Crystal Mangum. George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense. There is always racism everywhere, but America may be the least racist country on earth. For black people to think otherwise is to believe lies created to keep a narrative in place. The narrative gives the people who create it power and an appearance of virtue — Holder, Sharpton, Jackson, the news media and the rest. As for poor black people, the narrative keeps them poor and angry and helpless and so destroys their lives.

But the poison of lies does not discriminate. It taints the lives of white people too. White people see blacks rioting when a thug like Michael Brown gets shot by a cop. They see network news people trying to portray this thug as “a gentle giant,” a “little kid in a big body,” an “unarmed teen,” as if a six foot 250 pound 18-year-old man at the very height of his strength couldn’t rip a cop’s head off with his bare hands! White people see the Attorney General, the chief law officer of all the people, identifying himself as a “black man,” and calling blacks “my people.” They see looters from out of town robbing stores and saying, “We deserve this.” They see lowlifes like Sharpton and Jackson being treated like statesmen. They see a cop being set up as a scapegoat in the name of the narrative. They are told it is politically incorrect to describe what’s right in front of them.

And they get angry. Well, of course they do. It’s not right. It’s not fair. White people get angry and they fall into the trap of their anger. They start to think the problem is black people. “Black people are natural thugs; black people are given to violence; black people would rather wallow in their state-funded poverty than pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

Which is also nonsense. The behavior of poor black people is much the same as the behavior of poor people everywhere: the poor Irish the British used to hate, for instance, or the poor ashkenazi Jews who were once the despised Russian criminal class. or anyone trapped in the hellish slums of post-industrial cities. Even the shenanigans of cheapjack political sharpies like Holder had their analogues in the political histories of other races on the rise. When it comes to sin and corruption, we are none of us exempt.

The narrative of racism is just as much a lie on one side as on the other. The path out of poverty lies through free market capitalism, family, education and hard work. It’s the same path for every race and every race can take it. Black people are special only in that they are being kept off the path — kept from even seeing the path — by the Holders and Sharptons and network news teams who benefit from their poverty in all kinds of ways.

They are the villains of this story — they and their narrative — whatever color they are.