| We thought we killed the racism monster fifty years ago. But it stayed alive systemically in the form of Affirmative Action. |
You know those horror movies where you think the monster’s been killed, everyone starts to relax, and yet the creature’s not actually dead?
As an aside, I saw that happen in the jewelry industry’s reaction to the emergence of the Internet in the nineties. As with most businesses, the ability to online comparison shop was going to disrupt every jewelry store in America. But when the dot-com implosion happened in the early 2000s, retailers relaxed. That whole Internet thing had proven to be just a passing fad…
Uh, not exactly.
By the early seventies there was reason to believe “that whole racism thing” was dead as well. It hadn’t died easily and had taken quite a bit of killing. The Civil War freed the slaves, but that only ushered in a hundred years of atrocious discrimination, exemplified by Jim Crow laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a shotgun blast to the face of legal discrimination but arguably the real end came was when bigotry became socially uncool. When did that happen?
It happened January 12, 1971—a date that deserves far more recognition than it’s received. Arguably, THAT date is more significant than Juneteenth in terms of our nation’s progress towards racial equality. Sure, 1964 was when racial discrimination became illegal. 1/12/71 was when society made racial bigotry laughable—arguably far more important.
That was the date, more than half a century ago, when the sitcom “All In The Family” debuted on television. Probably the greatest TV show of all time in terms of cultural impact and significance (not to mention Nielsen ratings), AITF had one message and one message only: being racist is no longer cool. And after that, it wasn’t. After that, members of polite society started to lean over backwards to show how non-racist they were. After that, being non-racist was a badge of honor, and being a racist was about the most horrific thing you could be. It’s why politicians (and Facebook combatants) even today love to call each other racist—because in America there can be no greater insult. That’s probably as it should be, and we can all thank Carrol O’Conner’s “Archie” for making it so.
Sure, like those Japanese in the South Pacific islands still trying to fight WW2 long after it ended, racial bigots were still out there. But they’d had to go into hiding. They weren’t cool. Everyone despised them. And the way of life they were fighting for (white supremacy) was long gone. The racial discrimination monster was both legally and morally dead. Right?
Uh, not exactly.
Now out of the limelight, left in the dustbin of history, that presumed-dead creature suddenly raised an eyelid. It’s tail twitched slowly. It started to move again. It wasn’t dead after all! Oh no!
What had given it a new lease on life? Just this: Racial Discrimination Version 2.0, a vile, stinking body of bloated corruption sprayed with the perfume of a pleasant-sounding name: Affirmative Action. The idea was: blacks were still disadvantaged in America, so the way to really help them was to discriminate against whites.
It’s lost to history what Satanic individual first came up with that poisonous ideology, but in a better world they’d have been confined to an institution for the criminally insane. Tragically, in America in the mid-seventies, the idea caught on. Yeah, racial discrimination is so awful, let’s revive it and apply it this time against Whites! What could go wrong?
Pretty much everything. Correlation doesn’t prove causation but it’s worth noting that the inexorable march of the Black community—consistently upward on every metric since the end of the Civil War—at that moment stalled. And began to retreat.
Once the idea took hold that Blacks could never get ahead unless they were artificially helped by reverse discrimination, something akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy crept into Black culture in America. [Disclosure: most of what follows isn’t my perspective, a white guy. It’s from the writings of economist and historian Thomas Sowell, a black guy.]
That was the point in time when out-of-wedlock births took off (previously, Blacks had a lower incidence of OOW births than Whites). The drug and gang culture arose in the inner cities. “Not acting white” became a thing—a desirable thing. Rap music, with its horridly misogynistic and nihilistic lyrics, began to take over the community and define it. And inner city crime soared—with Blacks themselves being its most common victim.
Yep. The monster wasn’t dead after all. It was alive and wreaking havoc. Because it was now commonly-accepted wisdom, thanks to Racial Discrimination Version 2.0 (AKA Affirmative Action), that Blacks were victims in America. And—not surprisingly—Blacks began to act like victims. (See above.)
What will one day be shocking to historians and should be shocking to all of us today, is that this horrific trend line ironically started at the very moment when racism itself had been both officially defeated (Civil Rights Act) and culturally destroyed (made a laughingstock by “All In The Family.”) Our nation should have been in the mopping-up stage of ending racism and welcoming the Black community into a golden-age of equality on every metric. (Not “equity,” that’s the opposite. We’ll save that for another discussion.)
The poison of Affirmative Action crept into society everywhere, from university admissions, to race-based hiring, to school busing, to the forced integration of neighborhoods as proposed recently by the Biden Administration. The monster was getting a second wind, and growing stronger. Finally, it shed its reptilian skin altogether and morphed into its most ghastly form yet: Critical Race Theory.
CRT preached that a Black person in America was the victim of “systemic racism” from which they could never escape. Their skin color would define them—forever. And no matter what they might achieve on a personal level, it wouldn’t matter. Whitey was against them. The system was against them. It was a stacked deck. They’d never get ahead. They’d always be under the yoke of racial bias.
Psychologists would be hard pressed to come up with a more poisonous ideology, more effective at gutting the very soul of the one infected by it. Curiously, an odd sect of Christianity did invent something similar in the sixteenth century. Calvinism is the concept that—before birth—you are predestined to go to Heaven or Hell. Nothing you do in life will make a difference. The fix is in.
Yeah, and if you believe that, why bother to get out of bed in the morning? The fix is in. CRT teaches precisely that concept to Blacks. And it serves as the underlying world view to justify for all time Racial Discrimination 2.0: Affirmative Action. Talk about systemic racism. It exists today precisely in that form.
Or did until last week. While it’s too soon to tell, one can hope that the unequivocal ruling in Students For Fair Admission v. Harvard College will be the silver stake pounded permanently through the heart of the racial discrimination monster in America. Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, was himself the one who famously once said: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Well, there’s an idea! And with this week’s decision, Roberts was able to embed that concept into our nation’s legal fabric, hopefully forever.
With Affirmative Action—the last vestige of systemic racism—now ruled illegal, we can at least hope CRT will float away into dust, like when Thanos was destroyed by the Infinity Stones in that Marvel film.
Not all were happy. In her dissent Justice Sotomayor wrote “Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.”
Actually, Madame Justice, that is the ONLY thing that will. And now it’s the law of the land.
Sorry, monster. This time you really ARE dead. (I hope.)
Jacques Voorhees 