The genuine anti-racist considers the Integrity of the Principles, Values and Behavior under consideration rather than the skin color of those responsible for them. A recent statement by young Black conservative Joel Patrick says it all: People say I talk white. There’s no such thing as talking white, “it’s called speaking proper English.”
Absurdly, the “progressive” definition of “anti-racism,” as exemplified by Ibram X. Kendi, filters everything through the lens of race. It is, quite literally, racism in is purest form. And it is a perspective shared by the two most powerful and popular Black women on the planet today!
Michelle Obama’s 1985 Princeton thesis was entitled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” In it she rails against the dangers of her potential “integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure.” Ambivalent about Princeton and America, she seems to see both academic and financial success as somehow a betrayal of her Black heritage. Does her “logic” not imply that being both poor and ignorant is somehow the path defined for her by her race? With a remarkable lack of foresight, she concludes that should she choose to assimilate into the White social structure, it “will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society.” Could she possibly have been more wrong? I have not read her thesis which Christopher Hitchens, never known for his tact, declared to be utterly unreadable. But Michelle’s belief, 35 years ago, that America was somehow oppressive because it continued to revere those Principles and Values upon which it was founded, would seem to inform her equally nonsensical claim that it continues to be “systemically” racist in spite of the fact that she and her husband are absolutely revered among those of a certain mind-set, from coast to “progressive” coast.
Nikole Hannah Jones, a Black woman, was responsible for the N.Y. Times’ “1619 Project,” now taught in schools across America. Flagrantly ignoring the facts of history, it is teaching American kids that racism has always been the defining characteristic of their country, in spite of the multitude of principled condemnations and political actions, including a devastating Civil War, which it pursued while grappling with an institution with which most of the non-White, non-Western world was still comfortable.
The “1776 Report” commissioned by Donald Trump and published in the last days of his presidency, sought to correct the revisionist history propagated by Hannah-Jones. I have not read it and am certainly not prepared to defend its every word. It was of course hysterically berated on CNN, NBC, etc. in typically Trumpophobic fashion, as a silly, embarrassing, right-wing pack of lies. But its basic thesis that America did not begin until 1776 and therefore the designers of its Constitution and Bill of Rights can hardly be held responsible for what had transpired in the previous 150 years, would seem to be irrefutable. Moreover the “1619 Project” was condemned by a multitude of historians of no particular conservative bias as a grossly simplistic piece of propaganda. Strangely, perhaps the wealthiest Black woman on the planet, Oprah Winfrey, has decided to team up with Nikole Hannah-Jones in the production of several T.V. shows and movies given to dramatizing the pervasive racism of American society.
The species is imperfect and there will no doubt always be racists among us. In spite of abolishing Slavery 150 years ago, the U.S. continued to tolerate certain demeaning, segregationist practices in various parts of the country up until the recent past. But “conservatives” such as Larry Elder insist that Racism has never been less of a factor in the social/economic plight of his people. In 1940, he points out, 87% of Blacks lived below the poverty line; in 1960, 47%; and now a mere 20% ! Why, he wonders, would “progressives” continue to flog a narrative which grants impoverished Blacks the luxury of shirking their responsibilities, of not re-evaluating their priorities, by allowing them to wallow in their status as victims? [The answer, of course, is that it keeps them voting for Democrats.] Why, one might ask, are two of the most successful Women of Color on the planet pushing the narrative that Blacks are confronted by almost insurmountable racist barriers when they are evidence of the very opposite?
Michelle Obama frequently invokes the subject of “systemic racism.” As her Princeton thesis illustrated, Race has always superseded Reason in her vision of the world. Apparently it does so for Oprah as well. Martin Luther King famously said he wouldn’t consider America free of its racist past until it elected a Black man to the Presidency. Obviously it has done so, twice! Yet the ladies we have been discussing, rather than bringing their country together by celebrating its multitude of positives, in effect drive it apart by continuing to lament that it is still appallingly, pervasively Racist.