It’s quite likely that you’ve never heard of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) and its radical agenda, but this Alabama-based organization has had its eye fixed upon you and your country for a very long time. For nearly 30 years, it has been working relentlessly to advance the notion that because the United States is so thoroughly awash in racist inhumanity, its culture merits no respect — and no defense — whatsoever. And EJI can’t be dismissed as some sort of fringe lunatic group that’s barely scraping by on a shoestring budget; its coffers are flush with cash. In 2015-16, one of the largest and wealthiest corporations on earth, Google.com, announced that it was proudly giving EJI a cool $2 million in donations. Half of that sum was earmarked to fund the creation of “civil rights landmarks” such as a large national memorial honoring the 3,445 black Americans who lost their lives at the end of lynchers’ ropes from 1882-1964, plus additional memorial markers that would be situated at the various sites where those lynchings took place.
You might wonder why EJI deems it necessary to now dredge up the memory of a horrific practice that last occurred in this country 53 years ago. One would think that an organization that truly cared about the well-being of black people, might be more concerned by the fact that in any given year nowadays, the number of black-on-black homicides that occur nationwide far exceeds the number of white-on-black lynchings that have taken place in all the years since the Civil War, combined.
Obviously, then, EJI’s motivation has nothing whatsoever to do with promoting the safety of modern-day blacks. The group’s chief objective, rather, is to incessantly scold and shame Americans for their racist heritage, and to thereby make them lose all faith in the very legitimacy of their society — thus setting the stage for its ultimate collapse. In essence, EJI faithfully follows the counsel of the late pro-communist guru of “community organizing,” Saul Alinsky, who urged his fellow radicals to seize every possible opportunity to “rub raw the resentments of the people,” and to “fan the[ir] latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.” In that spirit, EJI is devoted to fomenting perpetual discontent and racial grievance in the hearts of black Americans — under the righteous-sounding banner of “social justice.” That’s because black discontent and grievance are good for business, when your business is to tear a nation apart along racial lines.
It is highly noteworthy that while EJI depicts lynching as an exclusively white-on-black phenomenon, there were in fact 1,297 whites lynched in the United States during that same 1882-1964 period. Obviously, this doesn’t in any way diminish the horror or the evil of the lynchings that were carried out against black people. Nor does it negate the fact that lynchings frequently had a racial component that targeted blacks, as evidenced by the fact that blacks comprised nearly three-fourths of all lynching victims. But as David Horowitz has pointed out, a majority of black lynchings were not incidents where groups of whites randomly chased down black people and strung them up for fun. Most black lynchings — like most white lynchings — were a form of extrajudicial “frontier justice” where angry mobs of vigilantes essentially anointed themselves as prosecutors, juries, and executioners. The mobs dispensed with due process and took it upon themselves to kill people — white or black — whom they believed were guilty of some transgression. Sometimes the transgressions were serious, like rape, homicide, or robbery. And sometimes, blacks were killed merely for violating social norms, like showing “disrespect” for a white person.
According to EJI, the practice of lynching “reinforced a narrative of racial difference and a legacy of racial inequality” that remains “readily apparent in our criminal-justice system today.” This legacy, we are told, is reflected in the “mass incarceration” that “has had devastating consequences for people of color” — e.g., “African Americans [today] make up about 13 percent of the nation’s population, but constitute 28 percent of all arrests, 40 percent of those incarcerated in jails and prisons, and 42 percent of the population on death row.” As far as EJI is concerned, these statistics are evidence of the “implicit biases” that “have been shown to affect policing … and all aspects of the criminal-justice system” — and cannot be attributed to the demonstrably higher rates of criminality in the black community. In short, we are asked to believe that everything stems, ultimately, from the fact that “the United States has done very little to acknowledge [its] legacy of genocide, slavery, lynching, and racial segregation.”
The Equal Justice Initiative is the archetypal subversive organization of the American Left. It rejects the very notion of colorblind justice as nothing more than a means of perpetuating a racist status quo that favors whites over blacks. And the alternative brand of “justice” that EJI proposes, is concerned only with offering up rationales for interracial hatred that never goes away. In short, EJI’s agenda is to promote, in the name of “justice,” racial strife that tears America apart.
