In calling the United States systematically racist, political leaders are blaming the people for problems the leaders themselves have caused.
Mankind has engaged in slavery for thousands of years. Great Britain and the United States brought it to an end.
But the United States remained racist until about 1965. The American people then began an extraordinary moral transformation, reducing racism enormously.
One way you can tell that America as a whole is no longer racist is by looking at advertisements. People who design TV ads are trying to sell a product. They rely on what viewers believe, think, and feel. They try to pleasantly surprise us and touch our emotions. If they fail in these efforts, the ads don’t work, and the products they’re advertising don’t sell.
You may have noticed how often blacks in television ads are displayed as one spouse of an intermarried couple? Sometimes they’re in bed together. Even ten years ago, we didn’t see this. If Americans were racist, they would be uncomfortable witnessing interracial marriages, and the ads wouldn’t work. They do work because neither white nor black viewers object to intermarriage. Would the whites feel this way if they were racist? Of course not. Systematic racism is baloney! Even conservative blacks are labeled with the term.
Back in the 1950s and early-60s, when America really was racist, you never saw blacks advising whites in advertisements how to spend their money. You seldom saw blacks in movies as anything but servants. You certainly didn’t see assertive black men with leading roles in movies. All these things are common now.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that our Dear Leader, Barack Obama, is black. Twice elected president, he received a plurality of votes even in states that were predominantly white.
It’s true that the income of blacks is generally lower than that of whites. But this isn’t because whites have kept the blacks down. It’s because the government has inadvertently kept the poor down, and the poor includes many blacks.
In a recent interview, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is white, said he had never been stopped by the District of Columbia police. But his fellow South-Carolinian Senator, Tim Scott, who is black, had been stopped numerous times. I myself, have had blacks tell me they’ve been stopped many times by police. They took this as evidence of racism.
I think not. Instead, it results from traditional patterns of behavior and recent government policies:
For thousands of years, slavery has often prevailed among many African tribes. Slavery involves the ubiquitous use of force. The blacks brought to the American South as slaves accordingly had a predilection to force and violence.
In addition, the southern economy for over 200 years was also based on slavery. When the blacks migrated out of the South, they brought with them an inclination toward force and violence.
Then came the war on drugs, where many of the suppliers of drugs are black. Because of the illegality, they’d be jailed if they tried to defend their property rights in court. Instead, they defend it with violence, usually in the very same black communities where they live.
Also came government low-income housing. This attracted people who needed jobs and repelled people who provided them, rending cities in twain. The isolated buildings became slums, with frequent incidents of violence.
Worst of all, there came a tremendous increase in welfare, which caused single-parent black families to grow from 20% to the current 67%. Here’s a salient quote from Thomas Sowell:
“Black families survived centuries of slavery and a generation of Jim Crow, but disintegrated because of the expansion of the welfare state.”
Indeed, the absence of a father in a home predisposes children, especially boys, to academic failure, criminal behavior, and economic hardship. Thanks, gov, for the billions you’ve spent on welfare. You’ve been a big help.
Now we have liberal “woke” policies, making the police fearful about losing their jobs when they exercise force in black areas. As I cite in Chapter 6, specialized police units that retrieved guns off the streets have been disbanded, supposedly because they were having disproportionate impact on African-Americans. But African-American communities are where guns are most often being misused. With the withdrawal of the police, gang members are using guns more than ever. Law-abiding citizens in black communities are begging for vigorous law enforcement.
For all these reasons, whites to some degree feel that blacks are a danger. The whites are unaware that this is due indirectly to government’s attempts to be helpful.
The worst example of American racism persists in the U.S. Congress. Liberals seem to believe that blacks can’t get along without government help. This implies that blacks are incapable of making it on their own. That’s pure racism. Of course blacks can make it on their own. Government just needs to get out of the way.
Political leaders don’t want to think about the possibility that they have caused the mess America is in. They didn’t do it intentionally, but they did do it nevertheless. It’s time for Americans to get government off their backs.
