We hear a ridiculous amount of rhetoric these days about racism. It's so over the top. It's so extreme. I have to say that for an immigrant coming to America, this whole thing is surpassingly strange. It's almost like if I were to go to a country like Rwanda or Somalia, and they tell me, "The country is divided between the tall people and the short people." And all I hear people talking about are tall people and short people. I would think I had arrived in a place where the people had something psychologically wrong with them. Why? Because how can these characteristics bestowed, you may say, by nature, have anything to do with who you are, or what you believe, or how you feel, or what kind of country you have? There's something fundamentally preposterous about it.
We have from the Left, from the progressives, the constant cry that America is full of racism. Now, for a while, I thought to myself, this is just so insane. No, the post office isn't racist, and no, our universities by themselves aren't racist, but it occurred to me, "Wait a minute, don't speak so quickly, because there actually is racism in American institutions." Our universities, to a degree, are racist. Why? Because they have racially preferential policies. So, if you want to talk about institutional racism, there it is.
The point I want to make is that when you think about it, the progressives are the real racists. I don't just mean by this that it's the Democratic Party, their history of racism. I'm talking about the progressives now. I'm talking about the Left now.
What is my proof? My proof is quite simple. It is both an observation about something going on today. And there's a historical lineage for it, which I want to draw out.
Here's my observation. When you look at how progressives and Democrats on the Left in general approach minorities, but specifically Blacks, there is an underlying assumption of Black inferiority. And that's the core meaning of racism. What does racism mean at its core? It means that my group or I think that your group is inherently inferior. They can't do it. They can't make it. They have to be treated as if they can't make it.
The question you want to think about is this: if the progressives were the true racists, this is obviously an assumption, we can't go into their minds and see what they think, but if they are, in other words, if racism is really on the Left, how would they act any differently than they're acting now? That's my point.
Let's look at how they're acting now. They're acting now as if Blacks are so incapable that they can't go out and get an ID. They oppose voter integrity laws because "Blacks can't get IDs." They act as if Blacks are so delicate that anything you say that they disagree with, they'll find insensitive. It isn't just sort of a word, "Yeah, I don't like it," but a kind of action. It's a sort of verbal bullet, and everyone has to jump up because "you can't say that. You can't disturb these fragile egos in this way."
The underlying assumption of the Left is that Blacks can't compete academically with any other group. That if you had meritocratic rules, "Well, we all know where Blacks will end up. At the bottom."
We hear from the Left that math is too linear, too structured, too logical, and, therefore, too Eurocentric for Blacks and other minorities to be able to do math. What, excuse me? How can you say this to people around the world, Chinese, Indians, Black, and Brown, and Yellow people, who do math and do it very, very well? This is absolutely insane. But it's not insane if there's an underlying hidden assumption of inferiority guiding the way you think and how you talk.
"Blacks are unable to keep time." Have you seen this? There's actually Critical Race Theory that says to the effect that the idea of keeping time, of punctuality, of getting things done, or being able to complete a task in a certain amount of time is racist. Why? Because, well, we all know "colored people's time." Haven't you heard of that one? People in other cultures don't keep time.
"Blacks can't think logically." Here's another assumption of the Left. Blacks can't compete for jobs on the same terms. You need to have preferential treatment. Why? Because if you had meritocratic treatment, let the best man get the job, it's not gonna work. The only things that Blacks "can do," apparently, is keep time in music and run or do athletics because, notice in those areas, the Left is perfectly happy to have meritocratic rules. No one says, "Hey, listen, Jews and Asian Americans are greatly underrepresented on the basketball court." We don't hear that. Meritocracy is fine in that domain.
So, the bottom line is that for the Left, Blacks are treated kind of the way you treat someone in a Special Olympics. You have to give them special consideration.
When I think back to India, where we had a kid in my class who had a mild case of Down syndrome (I think his name was Prakash), whenever he did something, there was always ridiculously excessive applause, but the applause was only an indication that people really didn't expect much of him. "Oh, that was a sentence from Prakash! How wonderful, Prakash! Keep using sentences!" Prakash says, "Let me go get my shoes." "Oh, Prakash is going to get his shoes! This is amazing! Let's all applaud! Prakash, go get your shoes! What a great job by Prakash!" The underlying assumption here is Prakash has got something wrong with him. And, therefore, every little thing that Prakash does, requires excessive solicitousness, requires excessive applause. The expectation, to be honest, is one of inferiority.
Now, interestingly, this has a historical pedigree because if you go back to the days of segregation, it's not widely understood that there were two racist groups in the South. There were the radical racists; these were the Ku Klux Klan's guys. They were the people who wanted to beat up Blacks and hang them from trees and lynch them. But this was only one wing of the Democratic Party. There was another wing of the Democratic Party (let's remember the South was a one-party state, there were hardly any Republicans with any influence in the South). There were the radical racists, but then there were also the Democratic patricians, the kind of ruling class of the South.
There's a very telling line about them from historian Joel Williamson in his book "The Crucible of Race" published by Stanford University Press. And he's talking about segregation, and he says that the patrician class of the South wanted to figure out a way that Blacks and whites could coexist. Of course, they thought Blacks were inferior. They shared this assumption with the other Democrats in the South. They agreed with the radical racists about this. But while the radical racists wanted to kill Blacks and hang them and destroy them, the patrician class said, "Let's find a way for these inferior people to coexist with us," and that they came up with the idea of segregation.
"Far from putting down the self-esteem of Black people," says historian Joel Williamson, "segregation was designed to preserve and encourage it." In other words, the basic idea was, let's let Blacks have their own schools. Let them drink from separate water fountains. This way, they don't get in our way. This way, we don't have to deal with them. But on the other hand, they will be able to develop, in a sense, to the limits of their own, you may say, arrested development. And what I'm getting at here is there was a built-in racist assumption among the Democrats, both the radical racists and the patrician class. All of this, by the way, is spelled out in detail in my book "The End of Racism," which gets into this at the level you won't even really believe.
What it tries to excavate is that there is a whole school of condescending racists. These are people who build their policies on inferiority. And what I'm trying to get at is that there's a kind of continuity. The old Democrats of the South who devised segregation, who thought of themselves in a sense as moral, "We have to help our own little Praskash's to make it in America. We're doing them a favor. We're allowing them to develop to their own capacity. It may be a lesser capacity, but that's okay." I think there are a lot of Democrats today who feel sort of the same thing, "We have to take care of Blacks." Why? "Because they obviously can't take care of themselves. America should provide them with a living." Why? "Because they can't earn a living."
The deep built-in racist assumption that these people are inferior, the Left normally doesn't say it. Every now and then, it kind of sneaks out, but by and large, it's the hidden assumption that explains not just some, not just a little bit, but all the policies of the contemporary Left.