No, Mr. President, the ‘soul of America’ isn’t racist
President Joe Biden is already starting to push people too far with his constant refrains about how racist this country is.
He is overstating a very weak case, and he risks becoming like former President Jimmy Carter when Carter’s so-called “malaise speech” had the annoying effect, in the insightful words of Vice President Walter Mondale, of “urging the people to be as good as the government.” The public and American culture are better than Biden says we are. He may soon see a backlash against him not just for hectoring us but for enlisting big government’s might to promote and enforce his racialist agenda.
Biden did it again Tuesday evening in his remarks responding to the three-count conviction of former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. He indicted the entire American judicial system, without proof, by saying that accurate and just verdicts are “much too rare” and that Chauvin’s just conviction was possible only because of a “unique and extraordinary convergence of factors.” He said that “systemic racism is a stain on our nation’s soul” while asserting, without evidence, that Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd was the result of such systemic racism. He cited the “racism and racial disparities” supposedly endemic to policing and criminal justice. And he described a Manichean “battle for the would of this nation” and “the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart.”
His message seriously exaggerates the relevant grains of truth therein. To start with, numerous careful (non-right-wing) studies actually show only the mildest of racial “disparities” in the system. Yes, more black people are arrested, but that stands to reason because black people commit more crimes on average.
Now, all decent people wholeheartedly reject the notion that criminality is somehow a racial trait. But poverty, family breakups, subpar education, and numerous other factors, many of them, of course, the lingering, evil generational effects of slavery and Jim Crow, surely play a role. The point here is not the “why.” The point is that the numbers do not lie about the “what” of criminal incidences, despite the narrative pushed by Biden and so many in the media. The statistics just do not show major racial bias in policing and convictions — although there is indeed disturbing evidence that sentencing is, on average, harsher for black convicts.
The bigger problem with the Biden/media-driven “systemic” racism narrative is not with the statistics but with the labels that misstate the nature of the problem.
Let us posit that “racism” means what, for decades, everyone agreed it means, namely the assumption that people of a certain ethnicity will possess inherent traits (such as character or intelligence) by virtue (or vice) of that ethnicity. Particularly egregious racism occurs when the stereotypes involved are negative ones. Racial “discrimination” is what happens when people (or systems) act in deliberate or obviously implicit furtherance of those racist assumptions. By these simple definitions, anybody can be racist, and anybody can act racially discriminatorily — but the obvious and horrific reality is that white racism and discrimination historically has been far more deleterious to black people in this country
There is no doubt that many of the systems and institutions, private and public, in the United States were racially discriminatory against black people for hundreds of years. Yet, that is an entirely different thing than to say that systems and institutions still discriminate that way. The reality is that the U.S. is one of the most multi-ethnic societies on earth, that in ordinary life (away from the media and identity politics), it is one of the most harmoniously multi-ethnic societies on earth, and that its guarantees of civil and human rights are stronger than almost every nation ever known to man.
As every sentient American can readily see, almost every instrument of government at every level, along with almost every leading cultural institution, not only has abandoned pro-white racism but for half a century has consciously and, yes, systematically worked against it. Some, indeed an increasing number, have become not just anti-racist but aggressively so, and more than a few have gone beyond even that, systemically trying to right past wrongs and current “inequities” by discriminating in favor of ethnic minorities.
Today’s racism, in other words, is absolutely not systemic or institutional. This remains true even though many inequities and social ills are surely rooted in the institutional racial discrimination that quite hideously existed in the past. But inequities are not “racism,” even if they began due to racism. To say otherwise, as Biden does, is to misstate the problem and thus leads to wrongheaded attempts at solutions.
Meanwhile, no fair-minded person would deny that racism and racial discrimination still exist. But they exist in individual human hearts and minds — probably (by extrapolating from multiple data points and from lived experience) within a far-from-insignificant minority of hearts and minds. Much of today’s racism is clearly less overt than during Jim Crow days — and also less palpably, physically burdensome than in the past.
Piercing glances, rolled eyes, and whispered asides can cause wounds to a psyche. Yet, where the racism does not show up in hiring, in public accommodations, or in harassment by bad cops, it is not within government's expertise or just powers over a free people to “fix” it. Government has no business punishing thoughts, even horrible ones, or even their distasteful utterances. That way lies tyranny.
The answer to racism lies in intermediate cultural institutions that promote true tolerance. Tolerance, in its proper sense, means not some ideological attempt to browbeat people about their inherent guilt, but a simple respect for human dignity and differences, along with, quite crucially, an even greater emphasis on commonalities. Put another way (and contra the identity politics fetishists), individual differences should be quietly respected but not dwelt upon, while commonalities, human and humane unities, should be celebrated.
Americans are, on the whole, a good and fair-minded people, full of the compassion that made huge majorities recoil at the video of Floyd’s death. We need no collective scolding from the bully pulpit.
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