Sydney M. Williams
30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314
Essex, CT 06426
www.swtotd.blogspot.com
Thought of the Day
“Race in America”
October 3, 2020
“It’s a universal law – intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education.
An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience,
whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
August 1914, 1971
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
1 From Britannica.com and written by Tommy Curry, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University.
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 harborsto 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.