Race dominates the national conversation today, but mostly in ways that are harmful and lead to more racial division. The term “racist,” for example, is so abused by the left race relations have been set back years. The list of things the left claims are racist is shocking: highways, tutoring, energy creation, math, AP courses, writing, classic literature, grades, borders, classic rock, camping in national parks, classical music, geology, founding documents, donations to museums, intact families, productivity, proper English, being prompt, SAT tests, merit-based school admission, homework, good manners, waste water treatment, workplace professionalism, academic standards, etc., etc. Incredibly, these are all serious claims peddled by the left and the media as a way of convincing naïve Americans that if they only elected more “progressives” to office, all of this “racism” would be dealt with.
Most informed Americans laugh at these ridiculous allegations but we shouldn’t, because the “America is systemically racist” myth is the main theme of Critical Race Theory, which public schools everywhere now teach in order to convince a whole generation of school children that America is so irredeemably racist, its institutions need to be destroyed and replaced by the “equitable” ideals of socialism. CRT defined is simply utilizing race instead of class to advance socialism in the USA. Shame on our schools who are fanatically promoting this rubbish and then lying to parents about it, with the most current example being Virginia.
CRT is the new religion of our public schools which today have no problem with censoring Christian influenced literature but aggressively promote books that uphold “anti-racism” as a religion unto itself, complete with high priests and a value system that denigrates the color blind consensus championed by Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s.
What the left means when they claim America is “systematically racist,” is that our institutions and our laws were created specifically to promote white supremacy, an absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theory. Race-based laws have not existed in America since the 1960’s, and when such “Jim Crow” laws did exist, they were created and enforced by Democrat state legislators, county supervisors and city officials, the same party today that lectures us about race on a daily basis. It was the Republicans who led the charge against such laws by passing the historic civil rights legislation in the 1960’s with much opposition from the Democrats. It was the GOP that eradicated systematic racism in the law but now is being accused of supporting it. Really?
Coupled with the bizarre “systematically racist” hogwash is its corollary, “White privilege,” the idea that White people automatically receive certain benefits in America due to their race. But the evidence that America today is systematically racist and dominated by White privilege is so flimsy, its laughable.
In the last 13 years millions of White voters elected a Black president twice and a Black vice president once. The late Gen. Colin Powell once headed the world’s mightiest military and many of the world’s most famous personalities are black Americans. Black Americans are actually over-represented in some occupations such as some professional sports and as pop music leaders, not to mention at some top colleges such as Harvard. Black Americans are proportionally represented in Congress, and America has a thriving Black middle class and 1.5 million Black millionaires, not quite proportional but way more than in any other country, both proportionally and numerically. Among the world’s wealthiest people are black Americans such as investor Robert Smith, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan.
If America is a racist society, there wouldn’t be tens of thousands of Black immigrants on waiting lists to become citizens and no wonder: the U.S. Census Bureau is reporting that some Black immigrant groups have a higher median household income than do White Americans, on a per capita basis. Not to mention that since 1965, America has restricted immigration from white-dominated countries such as those in Europe, while admitting proportionally, far more minorities. Indeed, when it comes to immigration policy, minorities receive favorable status, not whites.
However, there are some race-based policies and laws in effect today, but they favor minorities, such as racial preference policies practiced by many local governments and colleges. Minorities are so heavily over-represented in government jobs that if any racism is involved, it would be against whites. And today, it is whites, not blacks, who are suing universities for racial discrimination in their admission policies. California’s voters even passed a state-wide proposition which allows universities to discriminate against white students.
And let’s not forget the corporate world in which many of America’s largest corporations have introduced policies that effectively create racial quotas in hiring by giving more weight to one’s race than to one’s qualifications or merit. Does that benefit whites? Of course not. And yes, the corporations that engage in racial hiring quotas are often the same ones who institute “anti-racism” training for its employees in which everyone is lectured about how racist America is. Anyone detect any hypocrisy?
And while no one has conducted a systematic study, minorities are clearly over represented in Hollywood today in terms of television commercials. Proof? Next time you watch television, take an hour and count the number of actors appearing in commercials by race. Even though blacks represent only 13% of the population, they are easily over represented 2-3 times higher in commercials than their proportion in society. On the other hand, Whites, while 60% of the population, are vastly underrepresented in commercials, with many commercials not having any whites at all. But that’s just the beginning as one can already see that normal TV programming is headed in the same direction. So much for “White privilege.”
As for the all-cops-are-racists narrative, there is not a shred of evidence to back that up. Let’s not forget that no one has ever found evidence of racism in any of the highly publicized incidents used by the left to justify the BLM/Antifa riots last year, the George Floyd incident being exhibit #1.
Indeed, no evidence was ever found that indicated Officer Derek Chauvin was a racist nor was any evidence introduced in court to suggest that. Remember, 3 of the 5 cops involved in that case were minorities. Ditto for Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, etc. and all the other incidents the left wants us to believe were rooted in racism. Even the latest rage of the left, the Rittenhouse case, had nothing to do with race; how could it be when everyone shot by Rittenhouse in self-defense was white?
Surely if all these cops were motivated by race, there would be something in their background or in their file to suggest that, but nope, not a trace. And why would there be? The vast majority of large cities in America where almost all the riots occurred are controlled by minority-dominated city councils who hire the police chief and create the standards for whom the police hire. The idea that minority-controlled cities would have police departments dominated by racists, as the left wants us to believe, defies all common sense.
As for the argument that blacks are incarcerated at far higher rates than are whites, that’s a myth and there are no credible studies to support that. Blacks commit murders, thefts, robberies, etc. at rates far higher than any other racial group and that explains why their incarceration rates are higher. Simple as that. Nor is there any evidence for “racial profiling” by cops, a favorite theory of the left which holds that cops focus on blacks for traffic stops and other interactions.
Indeed, one could argue that in today’s America, blacks are given special preferences, above and beyond corporate hiring quotas and college admission preferences.
While blacks have benefitted vastly more than any other racial group from the trillions of dollars spent on “the War of Poverty” since the 1960’s, such entitlements were taken to a new level during the Obama era when, under the phony auspices of helping impoverished minorities, dozens of programs were enacted that specifically targeted blacks at the expense of poor whites. This racist legacy of targeting tax dollars to assist specific racial groups is being continued by Biden’s Build Back Better program, which directs billions of dollars toward minority groups. Indeed, Biden is funding all kinds of programs that specifically target minorities and ban whites, from mortgage assistance programs to welfare for farmers to federal assistance for small businessmen. These racist programs should be banned altogether as they are unconstitutional and clearly violate our civil rights laws.
Or let’s take crime. With over 300 riots last year, resulting in billions of dollars of damage and the deaths of at least 22 people, how many blacks were prosecuted for these crimes by big city liberal city attorneys? It appears that no one was in New York City and the Guardian found that 95% of all charges arising from Black Lives Matter protests in a dozen cities were dropped. Meanwhile, over 600 people were arrested – mostly whites – for the January 6 protest at the capitol. The vast majority of them committed no crime except trespassing and most have been held in horrible conditions for 10 months without even being charged with a crime. They’re treated worse than are murderers. One has to be blind to not see the clear double standard regarding race and crime in America today. I don’t see the White privilege here.
Then, there’s heath care. The left is pushing for a heath care system that gives preferential treatment to minorities over whites and some hospitals and health care systems are already doing this.
School discipline is also affected by racial preference and it certainly not whites. In 2012, Obama threatened school districts with federal “civil rights” investigations if they did not adopt race-based discipline policies because black students were being disciplined and/or expelled for violent activity at a rate far higher proportionally than any other race. Rather than try to address the root causes of this problem, Obama forced our schools to ban their color-blind disciplinary policies so that black students are simply not expelled anymore, no matter how much their actions warrant it.
Of course, this policy actually led to more violence in the public schools, not less, and continues to this day. Violent black gang members now rule many inner city schools today and the result, naturally, is that this racist policy has done great damage to black culture, teaching Blacks they can engage in violent activity at a young age without any consequences.
The reality is that in today’s America “White privilege” is a myth. There are no programs at any level of government in which whites are given preferential treatment – nor should there be — but there are hundreds of government programs at the local, state, and federal level that overtly or covertly favor racial minorities. Instead of fulfilling Martin Luther King’s dream of a color blind society, our ruling elites created a culture that promotes racial division. No one should be surprised by the “woke” culture that now engulfs America.
The supreme irony here is that the “America is systematically racist” myth is based on a body of work called Critical Race Theory, which was developed in the 1930’s by white communists who called themselves the “Frankfurt School.” These revolutionaries didn’t give a hoot about the well-being of minorities but instead clearly wanted to use them as a tool to create division in capitalist societies and then use this chaos to seize control. At the time, this was a radical new idea in communist intellectual circles since the original communist theorists such as Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx believed that dividing people by class would be the best route to Communist revolution.
Indeed, all of these race mongers on the left such as race-obsessed pundits like MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who constantly implies whites are evil, are parroting a philosophy created by a bunch of old white men from the 1930’s. Such irony.
If blacks really want to advance in our society, they need to look inward. Clearly, America is in the midst of a spiritual crises when it comes to the traditional family unit, but while a quarter of white kids have no father, the black family is in total meltdown. Almost 2/3 of black boys have no father figure in their lives at all, which volumes of research says increases the likelihood of drug use, criminal activity and dropping out of school. Secondly, black culture needs to jettison the idea, alluded to earlier, that certain traits like completing homework, staying in school, speaking proper English, being on time, etc., are “white traits” and accept that these are universal practices that guarantee success and have nothing to do with race. Dittos for gang culture, which is today celebrated in much of the black community. Third, black leaders need to revolt against the idea that blacks are inferior to whites and therefore must rely on racial quotas, “affirmative action” and the like, which, of course, have undermined black achievement levels and ultimately hold many blacks back in the long run. Lastly, they need to reject the race mongers in politics and in the media who promote an agenda developed by white communists almost 100 years simply to achieve power and advance socialism.
In essence, black success in America is being strangled by elements of its own culture. We know this to be true because black immigrants who typically arrive in our country without the baggage of today’s black culture, are wildly succeeding in America and don’t seem to encounter any obstacles whatsoever.
Steve Baldwin is a 35-year veteran of the conservative movement. He is the author of From Crayons toCondoms, the former executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, the former executive director of the Council for National Policy and a former California state legislator.
