Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from "I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America."
Four days after Biden’s election, [BLM co-founder] Patrisse Cullors sent a letter bearing a request to the new president and vice president in the name of Black Lives Matter. In the letter she claimed, “Black people won this election. Alongside Black-led organizations around the nation, Black Lives Matter invested heavily in this election. ‘Vote and Organize’ became our motto, and our electoral justice efforts reached more than 60 million voters. We want something for our vote. We want to be heard and our agenda to be prioritized.”
Cullors then described that agenda:
“Black people can neither afford to live through the vitriol of a Trump-like Presidency, nor through the indifference of a Democrat-controlled government that refuses to wrestle with its most egregious and damnable shame. President-Elect Biden and Vice-President-Elect Harris: both of you discussed addressing systemic racism as central to your election campaigns. The best way to ensure that you remedy past missteps and work towards a more just future for Black people—and by extension all people—is to take your direction from Black grassroots organizers that have been engaged in this work for decades, with a legacy that spans back to the first arrival of enslaved Africans.”
Biden’s response was direct and affirmative. On the very day he took possession of the presidency—January 20, 2021—Biden issued Executive Order 13985, which he introduced with these words: “. . . a historic movement for justice has highlighted the unbearable human costs of systemic racism.” Then he announced, “It is therefore the policy of my Administration that the Federal Government should pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”
President Biden’s embrace of a violent Marxist organization openly at war with America, went virtually unnoticed. The same was true of the malicious assumptions of the order and the claim he made days later when he said: “The fact is that systemic racism touches every facet of American life.”
Far from being a “fact,” Biden’s assertion was a monstrous lie. It was tantamount to the claim that America was a “white supremacist” country, and that black Americans—who have held the highest offices in the land, are a dominant force in America’s popular culture, and are the main recipients of government racial privileges—are “marginalized” and “underserved.” The federal government has provided nearly $30 trillion in welfare payments and other poverty handouts in the last fifty-odd years, of which all poor blacks have been legitimate recipients, along with members of other racial groups.
Moreover, only 20 percent of black Americans live below the poverty line. Given the fact that 80 percent of black Americans are productive citizens who are not poor, the claim that “systemic racism” or “marginalization” by race, or being “underserved”— rather than individual choices and failures—is to blame for black poverty is a politically useful and socially pernicious myth. The handouts and other government programs that the Democrats support in the name of fighting racial inequality only forge dependency and provide disincentives that discourage people from taking responsibility for their condition and from making the adjustments and commitments necessary for success.
For the political Left, which seeks to erase individuals and their responsibilities in favor of their racial, gender, and ethnic identities and victim entitlements, “systemic racism” is an indispensable slander against a nation that has actually outlawed racial and gender discrimination and provided generous subsidies to those who have fallen behind. The false charge of “systemic racism” is a convenient cover for the Left’s inability to identify actual racists directly responsible for inequalities in American life. It is unable to do so because America’s culture is so egalitarian and anti-racist that the numbers of actual racists (outside the Left itself) are so few, and their impact so inconsequential, that they don’t amount to a national problem.
Undaunted by this reality, the Left invokes “systemic racism” to describe every statistical disparity in social and economic outcomes. When Americans are viewed as individuals responsible for their decisions it is apparent that disparities in income, education, and even susceptibility to diseases flow principally from poor choices made by individuals who fail to take advantage of the opportunities available to them in a country where discrimination by race or gender is illegal. If America were a white supremacist nation where systemic racism in fact touched every facet of the nation’s life, the majority of black Americans would not be prospering, as they currently are, in the working, middle, and upper classes.
In a white supremacist society, whites would be the riches racial group. But they are not. Asian Americans from the Indian subcontinent are “people of color” and experience prejudice at the hands of individual bigots. But they are also the richest ethno-racial group in America, with median household incomes of $120,000 per year, twice the national average. More pointedly, this is $44,000 more than white households’ median income. For Asian American households as a whole — including Japanese, Pacific Islanders, and others, the median annual income is $98,174 — far higher than the $76,057 median for white households. How is this possible if America is a white supremacist nation and systemic racism causes adverse consequences for “people of color”? It is not possible, and the president’s claim that income disparities are caused by racial injustice is a lie.
