What racism in America really looks like.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

“I have a horrible story to bring you about a woman named Sherita Dixon-Cole,” Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King began.

Dixon-Cole claimed that she had been sexually assaulted during a traffic stop by a Texas police officer. The story, like so many black victimhood myths about police officers, turned out to be a lie. Body camera footage conclusively disproved it. But by then the damage was done.

The Root had posted a photo of the officer as part of a post alleging a racist culture of police rape. “Black women have always… found themselves at the intersection of state and sexual violence, because this country teaches men… that black women are disposable,” it insisted.

Behind the pseudo-academic jargon of social justice were the same racial prejudices and tribal fears of victimized women that led to Emmet Till’s death. Only this time the races were reversed.

And the vigilantes organized a cyber-lynching party by sending hate and abuse to a completely different Texas cop who shared the same last name.

And to his mother.

In Timmonsville, South Carolina, Rev. Jerrod Moultrie, who also heads the local NAACP, claimed that a police officer had “racially profiled” him and harassed him “cause I was driving a Mercedes Benz”.

Once again, body cam video proved that it never happened. But the NAACP announced that it was conducting its own investigation and claimed that there might have been another racist cop.

“Racial profiling, in this context, concerns the reasons for stopping a particular vehicle at a particular time, not whether the officer conducting the stop (or any other officer on the scene) is impolite,” it stated. Since it’s impossible to prove that a traffic stop wasn’t racially motivated (the impossibility of proving a negative fuels paranoid fantasies about ubiquitous racism), that’s guilty until proven innocent.

Why were Shaun King, the NAACP and assorted black nationalists willing to believe the worst of white police officers? Black victimhood is based on the fragility of black people and the evil of white people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in, Between The World and Me that the police officers and firefighters who died on September 11 “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Fragility feeds dehumanization. Coates’ exaggerated sense of his own victimhood had him dehumanize the FDNY firefighters who climbed 78 floors with heavy equipment on their backs to rescue people, regardless of race or color, as inhuman menaces. Not people, but violent forces. The poetry of Coates’ victimhood is marinated in the self-pity of the racist for the prejudices that made him a bigot.

And if police officers aren’t really people, it’s easy to believe the worst of them.

Sherita was so readily believed, despite the lack of evidence, because her claims clicked with the prejudices of black nationalists. The NAACP went on defending Moultrie because it was easier to believe in a white racist conspiracy than to believe their own lying eyes. That’s what prejudice does to you.

Prejudice is at the heart of both the Texas and South Carolina cases. And it’s there churning underneath the recent blizzard of anecdotal claims of white racism. Like all prejudice, it has real victims.

The victims are accused of thinking the worst of black people, when it’s actually black nationalists who think the worst of white people. And they justify their prejudices with accusations of racism. The accusations dehumanize white people as innately evil and burdened from birth with white privilege.

These accusations are not just false. They’re racist and dehumanizing.

Some of these accusations, like those in Texas and South Carolina, like the racist hoaxes at the Air Force Academy, USC, St. Olaf College, Kansas State University, Eastern Michigan University, Capital College, and the University of Maryland, to name just a few in the last two years, are invented.

These hoaxes succeed initially because they pander to prejudice.

It’s almost a misnomer to call them hate crime hoaxes. They are hate crimes. But the real targets of these hate crimes were white people. These “hoaxes” advanced stereotypes about white evil. They brought their prejudices about white people to life by inventing and faking them.

And, if the real culprits hadn’t been exposed, a white male, the likely profile of the perpetrator, could have easily been wrongly accused, convicted of the crime or expelled from a university. Even 24 years later, we still hear a lot about Susan Smith. But there were multiple black Susan Smiths on campuses across the country just last year. The media’s latest racial paranoia trend has been blowing up stories of white people wrongly calling the police on black people. But the reverse keeps happening on campuses.

Black nationalists use racial paranoia to manufacture solidarity, sanctifying the martyrdom of the “black body” at the hands of the “white devils”. But while the black body may be a useful metaphor, the white devil are real people subjected to the racist dehumanization that is a necessary part of racial paranoia. And racial paranoia is how you get racism. Hating and fearing another race leads to prejudice, discrimination and violence. Fantasies of black victimhood have led to real white victims.

Earlier this year, Kori Ali Muhammad targeted, shot and killed 4 white people in Fresno, California. The Nation of Islam follower shouted “Allahu Akbar” and “Free black people” when he was taken into custody after his killing spree. The black nationalist blamed his crimes on a resentment of white racism.

Prejudice doesn’t necessarily lead to racist murders like those committed by Muhammad and Micah X. Johnson in Dallas, but racist murders are carried out by racists who dehumanize other people.

And when even saying, “white people” is fashionably derogatory, dehumanization is everywhere.

The left insists that racism is about power. It’s not.

You don’t need to have power to hate. Everyone has that power. Nor do you need power to carry out a racist attack. Most healthy, able adults have that power no matter what their skin color might be.

Racism is about the opposite of power. It’s insecurity masquerading as superiority.

The left focuses on institutional racism. Or racism as policy. That’s convenient because it can then talk about power instead of hate. And anyone who is white and has power is by definition guilty. Much like the police officer who stopped an NAACP president in his Mercedes and was smeared for it. The officer probably doesn’t have his own luxury vehicle, nor does he head an organization, but he is white.

So were the Founding Fathers. Close enough.

But anti-black racism as policy is as exotic as Bigfoot. If it weren’t, we would be taken on tours of segregated water fountains instead of microaggressions and implicit bias training. Disparate impact looks for statistical anomalies and, out of prejudice, attributes them to white racism.

Fanatical racism, that of the Klan, the Nazis or the Nation of Islam, is fed by insecurity. Its glorification of its own superiority always gives way to the lurking menace of the Untermensch or the white devil. The master race claims are unconvincing. They’re put forward by history’s losers angry at the past.

Insecurity is central to the racial paranoia of Black Lives Matter and countless other black nationalists and their organizations. Black nationalists, like Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood and every other hate group, are convinced that they can only regain their destiny by destroying those who stole it from them.

The only way to become truly superior is to kill those whom they secretly believe are superior.

Black victimhood both condemns and sacralizes its own state. Pride is defined by its antithesis. Without the white devil, there is no black nationalism. Black nationalism demands the white devil and summons him forth with hate crime hoaxes, with smears, with word games that distort what racism is and isn’t.

Victimhood doesn’t ennoble you. It degrades you even as it teaches you to degrade others. No amount of hate can ever make you proud of your shame. And pretending that hate is love won’t unite you.

I have a horrible story to tell you. It’s about where racism really comes from in America. And it’s about who the victims of victimhood are.