No one in America should be privileged because of the color of their skin or ethnicity. Today, thanks to higher education’s transformation to an industry immersed in aversion to Americas, the words of Martin Luther King have been turned on their head. Skin color, or as Peter Wood from the National Association of Scholars labels it, “identitarian indignation” reigns supreme and character is irrelevant.
Trying to ameliorate one human inequity by creating another is a fool’s errand birthed in the academy through a devotion to the Marxist postulates of postmodernism and critical race theory, painting America as a wretched nation. They serve as a politicizing and overarching explanatory framework for differences in racial outcomes. Corporate America and federal and state bureaucracies became devotees of this perfidious construct during the allegedly post-racial Obama years.
As Tucker Carlson states, “Critical race theory it is also the very definition of the racism they’re claiming to fight,” intending to fight racism through blatantly racist policies. Harvey Mansfield opined in the Wall Street Journal that we now “live with the paradox of a racist society without racists…for an ism is an opinion, a doctrine, not a mere condition.” In other words, it is simply a solution in search of a problem.
White Americans have been bombarded by accusations of “white privilege,” issued first through the academy’s love-fest with critical race theory. The mainstream media and their Democrat enablers then followed suit. As I have argued in these pages, white privilege is a central tenant of the specious argument about systemic racism, the concocted brainchild of progressives and neo-Marxists. While the ensuing policies were meant to end racism, they have promoted significantly more racism, this time against whites. As Peter Wood points out, “Systemic racism appears to be like the old concept of ‘aether,’ an invisible, immeasurable, but all-pervasive substance.”
Interestingly, Dennis Prager reveals the American Press (AP) Stylebook’s “rules of writing style”, now prescribes “Black” with a capital “B” when referring to African Americans, while those of us who are melanin-deprived, are “white” without capitalization. He ended by reasoning that both black and white are skin colors, not cultures. The AP told ABC News that the basis of this rule-change was “white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don't have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color.” Not anymore! Any melanin-deprived person who has been looking for a professional-level job over the past decade has experienced white discrimination where jobs advertise “persons of color are preferred.”
We have had black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, John McWhorter and Shelby Steele debunk the premise of systemic racism for nearly four decades. Interestingly, a Google and Bing search of “black intellectuals” only brings up the usual progressive suspects. On a recent “Life, Liberty & Levin” show, Sowell stated that the term “systemic racism” is devoid of substance, “It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one tests hypotheses. It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels in the age of the Nazis, where he said that people will believe any lies if it is repeated long enough and loud enough."
Beyond virtue signaling and ideological expressions, does the capitalization of racial designations really matter and make things better or simply more polarized? Is anyone addressing the fastest growing population in America--people of Asian descent? Their history of mistreatment is challenged only by black Americans. They are also the most over-represented in STEM subjects at America’s top flight universities, and it high-tech jobs. They also have the highest income by race. Why are they ignored by the AP and disliked so much by social justice warriors? An accurate analysis of American history reveals that no single minority in America has been treated worse than the more than 24,000 Chinese who built the American railroad system. At one point more than 90% of the transcontinental railroad workers were Chinese who were paid $26 a month, less than half of white workers pay, while working six days a week, 12 hours per day. Ironically, California treated them worse than black slaves were treated in the South. An inordinate number died performing this dangerous but critically important work and opening up our nation from sea to shining sea.
Let’s face it, all races receive marginal discrimination from other races; yet it is hardly systemic. As Victor Davis Hanson points out in 'Mexifornia,' the progressive woke’s “dream is vastly different from the multiracial society where millions of Americans with a broad spectrum of skin colors speak the same English, share the same commitment to the values of the Constitution, and gradually become indistinguishable through integration, assimilation and intermarriage.”
Responding to alleged systemic racial discrimination by new societal policies that favor one ascendent race over others amounts to de facto racial discrimination, the very perfidy the left pretends to deplore. Each of us individually and as part of social and political groups has a responsibility both to ourselves and America regarding how we treat race. Unlike Barack Obama, who announced that we was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” and bragged on television that he would make America a post-racial nation, but failed with humiliating frequency, we the people must do our part to ensure that our homes, communities and nation are a welcoming place for all races to live, work and play. Whites are welcomed less in the south side of Chicago, downtown Baltimore, East L.A. and Compton than people of color are in most American neighborhoods.
It is now difficult to get into elite university programs without being a person of color or of another protected class. Real systemic racism allows under qualified people of color rapid advancement into government and corporate executive positions as I have pointed out elsewhere. If there is a real societal privilege in America today, it is black or color privilege, not white privilege. Black students now typically get into elite universities with SAT scores 200 points below whites and 300 points below Asians. To remedy America’s systemic racism, blacks are forced ironically into the one-down position of dependency on the goodwill of college administrators and corporate bosses, many of whom are white, for acceptance and advancement.
We must continue to conscientiously judge all people by the content of their character and most assuredly, not the color of their skin. Racial preferences and quotas, educational indoctrination in social justice and critical race theory, use of capital and small case letters as signifiers under the guise of healing, only inflame and instill racial inequality among us. Supporting groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa and anything and anyone funded by George Soros is antithetical to this cause, but definitely supports the new black privilege. But then again, it is easy for me to say since as Foreigner once sang, “I’m a dirty white boy.”