Month: August 2021

Given the continued obsession of my Republican colleagues with critical race theory, using an attack on Critical Race Theory to distract attention from the real issues of systemic or institutional racism in our society, we need to look at some of the facts that confirm the inequality that still exists in America.

In a recent Murray Ledger column on CRT, friend Winfield made a correct distinction between correlation and causation. We historians are fond of telling our students that just because World War II followed only twenty years after World War I, the first world war was not the cause of the second.  The fact that something comes after something else does not prove that it was caused by the first event (the “fallacy of the false cause”)

Dr. Rose then adds that one cannot prove that “laws and institutions of our country” actually caused “social, political and economic inequalities between white and non-white people.”  He suggests that inequality could be caused by other factors as well.  I agree. 

We do need, however, to think further about the objective reality of racism in America by looking at possible causes well beyond the existence of discriminatory laws, most of which have been repealed.

First, we need to go beyond the notion that race is essentially a matter of biology.  Race is profoundly cultural. It is learned behavior.  It is in our attitudes more than in our DNA.  My former colleague, Ken Mason, the first African-America hired in the History Department convinced me that all the racial categories devised by scholars over the past three centuries, such as Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, were largely European ways of codifying appearance, especially our color consciousness. 

We are all humans, and, although some biological differences do exist, it is mainly skin color that matters, Professor Mason believed.  White people don’t discriminate against African-Americans because the latter are more likely to get sickle cell anemia, nor do we express hostility to Asian-Americans because their eyes look different than those of Caucasians.

We discriminate mainly based upon skin color, because it is an easy identifier that allows us to look negatively upon a person whom we want to believe to be different. When we make such comparisons in social matters, we are always judging one person or group superior to another.

Judgmental comparisons (aren’t most comparisons really judgments?) are not found in “pure” science or mathematics, but only in the “cultural” studies called social sciences or humanities in our universities. 

And that is why systemic or institutional racism is a cultural rather than a biological issue. This would be true whether or not critical race theory ever existed—and well before Republicans used it as a catch-phrase.

In 1968 the Kerner Commission, established by President Johnson to study unrest in American cities in the 1960s, wrote that “white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

And that is a definition of institutional racism, not a new thing.        

Dr. Rose calls CRT “a pernicious ideology which attacks the core principles of our civilization,” by which I assume he means American ideas of unity, “e pluribus unam” (from many one) and other values we link to democracy.  However, his statement better describes our continuing embrace of racism, not necessarily in our laws, but certainly in our society and a powerful reality in the lives of our black citizens. 

Biological differences do not explain why African-American per capita income averages $24,700 annually and white income averaging $42,700 (Census bureau, 2018).  This is not due to decisions made by individual racist employers as much as by institutional practices endorsed or tolerated by many white Americans.

It is not nasty neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, or academic CRT promoters who created a world in which black home ownership is 44% while white home ownership is 73%.  It is all of us white folks who tolerated centuries of black people being considered first property and then second-class citizens in America, the country on which we ask God to shed his grace.

Shame on those who attack CRT instead of joining the rest of us in seeking justice for all—something which can only be secured if we work together to end systemic racism.

            Well, my Republican friends and opponents are at it again.

            Their newest distracting cry of “ain’t it awful” is their attack on critical race theory “the latest malignancy unleashed on our society and political system by predatory nihilists of the left,” according to friend Winfield’s mild language in his July 21 Murray Ledger and Times column.

            Earlier, in a July 9 column, Republican District Chair Greg Delancey criticized the National Education Association (NEA) for “declaring war on those looking to keep critical race theory out of the schools,” (New York Post editorial). He then praised Republicans for pre-filing bills in Kentucky to “ban critical race theory from public schools and post-secondary education curriculum.”

            Critical race theory, says Wikipedia, is a “body of legal scholarship” challenging the notion that laws against prejudice could end racism.  Scholars in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that civil rights laws of the 1960s did not end discrimination because “race can intersect with other things (such as gender and class) to produce complex combinations of power and disadvantage.”

            The fact that some of the critics of these civil rights laws were Marxists does not negate the existence of systemic racism in our society. Calling something Socialist or Marxist is an emotional tactic used by many Republicans to scare their base into voting “correctly.” 

These are labels, not arguments.

            And the same is true of the constant repetition of the phrase “critical race theory.”  It is a “red herring,” a political term “intended to distract from the main issue.”  Critical race theory is not taught in any public school—it is generally studied in graduate school programs.

            What is taught in some public secondary schools (and should be in all) is the history and presence of systemic racism in America, the existence of cultural attitudes and practices that did and still do prevent many Americans from being treated justly. Slavery ended but was replaced by segregation and Jim Crow laws and customs that kept black Americans from gaining wealth, voting, securing good jobs, and feeling safe in their homes and streets. 

            Teaching this can promote racial healing, not “hatred,” as many Republicans want us to believe. (See my June 23 column “Creating Fear instead of Solutions.”)

            Racism is not primarily caused by individuals who discriminate.  It is embedded in American culture, despite laws against it.  It is not merely “an obvious biological concept,” as Dr. Rose proclaimed.  

Whatever the biological differences among humans, the concept of race has been used for centuries as a way of justifying and explaining our color consciousness. It helped light-skinned Europeans justify their belief that they were not only superior in power and material wealth to those with various shades of non-white skin but were also morally and intellectually superior.  

So here are some of the ways systemic or institutional racism has affected many African Americans past and present:

1. Social Security originally excluded domestic and agricultural workers, many of whom were black. This was done to get the act approved by southern Democrats;
2. After World War II, the G.I. Bill helped white Americans veterans secure mortgages but “federal policy said that the very presence of a black resident in a neighborhood reduced the value of homes there.” This made it difficult for blacks to get mortgages. This is a classic example of institutional racism. Those who enforced this policy were not themselves personally prejudiced against blacks;
3. The “War on Drugs” for decades targeted “one type of cocaine” used by poor blacks but not another used by wealthier white people. Hence more African Americans were imprisoned.  As recently as 2018, blacks arrested for marijuana possession numbered 567 per 100,000 residents while similar arrests of whites were only 156 per 100,000. (Time, June 2020 & Health & Human Services cabinet).

Some of these laws and practices were changed, but the lives of many black families have been diminished for generations affecting their ability to create wealth and pass it on to their children. 

            These examples of racism should be studied, not because all whites are personally racist, but because disturbing inequality is part of our history and our present life.  

            We need justice for all. Truth instead of scary lies will help us provide this. 

(to be continued)