Systemic Racism: What would Dr. King think?

January 20, 2022

Tags: BLM, cancel, CRT, MLK, systemic racism, Thomas Jefferson
Posted in: Democracy

On this day, what would Dr. King think about critical race theory?

As an educated man, he might recognize it has little intellectual underpinning. You just have to believe. Questioning is haram. He would likely disagree the force of jihad is necessary to end the white reign, or that non-believers are racial infidels, or that ends justify means. It is hard to see how King, who followed a very different theology, could agree with his intellectual and political successors.

His intellect would almost certainly be offended by the latest woke gambit of challenging unbelievers (“opponents”) to word games, tricking them into not being able to “define” CRT so they can’t oppose it. The con is definitions believers use are squirmy. The simplest is everything good that happened to whites and everything bad that happened to blacks from 1619 up to this moment is because of slavery, which ended over 150 years ago. Passive victims are antithetical to King’s oratory.

Whatever good ideas might sneak into any discussion of systemic racism are almost immediately squelched by some of the dumbest things ever said aloud. No matter which definition you write on the golden tablets, the result is people demanding more black sitcom characters with the same zeal as demanding we strip Jefferson’s name off of high schools, and believing both things accomplish something. As historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad put it “The Dr. King we choose to remember was indeed the symbolic beacon of the civil rights movement. But the Dr. King we forget worked within institutions to transform broken systems.”

Most people who believe in systemic racism avoid questions. It’s all about empty faith, belief without the possibility of proof. Like any zealot, they simply know it is true because things haven’t worked out in their own lives and they cannot be responsible and they think we should reshape all of society based on their interpretation of lived experiences. They mostly just wait for something bad to happen to blacks, or on dry days resurrect some bad event from the past (how many times does Emmitt Till have to die?)  and say “There, that’s it, systemic racism.” If anyone objects, they shout that person down, deplatform or cancel them, smite them, or, as a racist, crucify them. That is all a long way from what King wrote to us all from his jail cell in sweltering Birmingham, saying the “means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”

Playing for Team Systemic Racism means the willful ruling out of bounds discussions which could lead to unwelcome conclusions. So, you must ignore cases of blacks doing well, and ignore cases of whites doing poorly (e.g., most of West Virginia.) You must ignore the spread of good and bads for all other races of color, brown, yellow, etc. You must also dump people as diverse as Hasidic Jews, 19th century illiterate Irish immigrants, and Louis C.K. into a category called “white.” You must ignore how actual avowed supremacist groups like the KKK and the Nazis treated people — the white Nazis killed the white Jews and white supremacist groups like the KKK violently opposed white immigration from southern Europe. You would think white-on-white would be counter-evidential to systemic racism.

In the same vein, you must ignore the term Hispanic as racist itself in your quest for allies. It makes no sense lumping people from 32 countries who happen to speak a variant of the same language together, with a Disney-fied Lin Manuel Miranda as their leader in song. Systematic racism requires victims, the more the better, so you must search for them. For example, you can cite Japanese-American internment camps while without irony claiming Asians unfairly fill what should be black spaces in elite schools.

As a systemic racism supporter you must not question why racist whites have “allowed” Asians, Hispanics, Persian real estate agents, Ghanaian princes, and others to succeed. You don’t want to talk about how all sorts of groups found success in America. If we are a white supremacist nation, we are quite bad at it. You must also not wonder why the racist police are equally poor at racism, failing to gun down in appropriate numbers the many non-whites who cross their gun sights in Asian, Indian, and Hispanic neighborhoods.

To believe some sort of system underlies the state of blacks in America for four hundred years, you must also ignore in the supposed quest for white supremacy things like whites doing/voting for/supporting/paying with their lives to fight the Civil War to end slavery, the Civil Rights Acts, the A-Z of welfare and the Great Society, affirmative action, employment quotas, laws against redlining, and all the like. While not everything worked as it should, systemic racism deals in simplistic — forgive me, black and white — terms. You must insist no real progress has been made over hundreds of years.

Belief in systemic racism also requires not asking a lot of questions about how of the 12 million blacks abducted into slavery out of Africa, only about 300,000 landed in the U.S. The millions of others went elsewhere, where apparently there is not systemic racism today. Also, you will not want to talk about how slavery was part of the economies of nations across the globe for centuries but none of them seem crippled today by systemic racism, just us. You would want to know why BLM isn’t protesting to defund the Dutch, Arab, or the British, who helped create the global slave trade infrastructure. Systemic racism demands you see slavery as a distinctly American thing when in fact that was hardly the case.

You have to believe there exists a mass movement to not teach about racism to make room for the new theology. Even in my own lousy public high school 40 years ago we learned about Little Rock and Brown. All history classes are incomplete, most due to lack of time, some due to ignorance, some on purpose. That’s a good conversation to have, but since it doesn’t fit the meme we don’t have it. Since 1957 we’re still just shouting at each other. So in 2022 we get Martin Luther King Day without the values King embodied.

You have to be comfortable on the one hand of turning George Floyd into a hero without paying attention to George Floyd the drug addict, the thief, a guy who wasted his life becoming America’s Top Victim. At the same time, you must be comfortable recasting Thomas Jefferson as no longer the author of the Declaration of Independence but just another white rapist.

A lot to think about on this day, remembering MLK.

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