RACE IN AMERICA: SYDNEY WILLIAMS
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Bigotry in any form is ugly. Certainly, racism exists in individuals, but does institutionalized racism exist in the United States? This essay owes its origin to an interview with Kay Coles James, conducted by Nicole Ault in last weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. The title was “On Being Black and Conservative.” Ms. Coles was in the second class to integrate her junior high school in Richmond, Virginia in 1961. Today, she is president of the Heritage Foundation. Could that have happened in a systemically racist country?
The concept of systemic racism stems from Critical Race Theory (CRT), which states that race, “instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of color.”[1] Systemic racism is defined by Wikipedia as “the formalization of a set of institutional, historical, cultural and interpersonal practices within a society that more often than not puts one social or ethnic group in a better position to succeed, and at the same time disadvantages other groups in a consistent and constant manner, that disparities develop between the groups over a period of time.”
But does systemic racism exist in the U.S.? Certainly, there are individual racists, as well as anti-Semites, misogynists, xenophobes, homophobes, anti-Catholics and those infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome. To define the United States as systemically racist, however, connotes a conspiracy that does not appear to exist. In 1948 President Tuman signed an executive order committing the government to integrate its segregated military. The term “affirmative action,” affecting the hiring practices of government contractors, was first used in Executive Order No. 10925, issued by President Kennedy on March 6, 1961. Jim Crow laws (state and local laws enacted to maintain racial segregation) were abolished with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned segregation in public places and prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices, which had been in effect in many southern states since the end of the Civil War.
It is important to know whether racism is institutionalized in the United States, or whether we live in a nation in which some individuals harbor racist opinions, because responses are different. If the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are inadequate to the problem, Congress must address the issue of systemic racism. A belief in systemic racism was behind legislation just passed in California, which requires publicly held companies headquartered in that state to have at least one “racially, ethnically or otherwise diverse director by 2021.” A belief that systemic racism does not exist was behind President Trump’s executive order banning all taxpayer-funded diversity awareness training, programs which teach how America is “fundamentally racist and sexist.” If the country is not systemically racist, but individuals still hold racist views, solutions must be found in families, schools, places of worship and civic organizations. Morals and cultural attitudes cannot be legislated, they must be learned and emulated.
As the United States prospered, it grew more secular. Over the past twenty years, church attendance, according to a Gallop poll, declined from 70% to 50%. A growing secularization has been accompanied by a decline in traditional values, including marriage. In 1960, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 5% of American children were born out of wedlock. In 2008, the number was 40.6%. The numbers for black American babies are worse. In 1965, 24% of black American babies were born out of wedlock. Today that number is 69%. An American Community Survey, based on census data for the years 2006-2008 and published by the Heritage Foundation, found that “the rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing is a major cause of child poverty.” In single-parent, female-headed families, 36.5% of children live in poverty, whereas in married, two-parent households the number is 6.4%. Receding values have been accompanied by widening gaps in tolerance and respect, as well as in incomes and wealth.
Too many educators in public schools, especially in inner cities and in a multicultural environment, no longer champion virtues to be adopted by students. As racial distinctions are highlighted, gone missing are mutual respect and tolerance for opposing ideas. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words in the rubric that heads this essay found concurrence in words from Helen Keller: “The highest result of education is tolerance.” Our universities have become safe harbors to protect “victims” against harmful words, not to teach tolerance and respect. Students are segregated by identity: race, religion or gender, finding themselves on the march toward a society where “skin color is placed firmly and proudly at the forefront of identity,” as the political commentator Leonydus Johnson wrote. These students graduate knowing little of their country’s history and civic organizations, and of the men and women who made the U.S. unique in the annals of mankind. Making things worse, the Left discourages public school choice for the poor – charter schools and vouchers – options available to the wealthy. Other avenues have been curtailed as well. For example, the number of students in Catholic schools – once a viable option for the middle class – has declined by 65% since 1960.
Policies of identity obfuscate the importance of character. At heart, the progressive’s belief in systemic racism is, in fact, racist, as it confines the individual to the group to which he or she has been assigned. In her interview with Ms. Ault, Kay Coles James cited herself as an example that conservative values exclude racism: “If I were walking into a progressive think tank I would have to do the calculation and determine: Were they trying to check some boxes , am I a product of their identity politics, did they pick me because I am black and because I’m a woman? Being a conservative, I have the comfort of knowing that at best that was an afterthought.”
Systemic racism is not a problem in the U.S. It is the bigotry of individuals that still exists. Supercilious members of the politically elite, wearing their BLM badges, see themselves as above prejudice. Yet, tolerance and fairness are taught in churches, synagogues, families, civic organizations and schools, institutions too pedestrian for coastal elites and those in Washington with their abettors in the media and academia. James Russell Lowell, the 19th Century American poet, once wrote” “The devil loves nothing better than the intolerance of reformers.” Ideas – not race, sex, religion or ethnicities – are what should divide us. That division is healthy and necessary in a functioning democracy. Tolerance and respect are needed to cure prejudice where it exists. These are characteristics that cannot be mandated by government edict; they must be learned when young. Responsibility lies with all of us, individually.
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