Dancing straw man

It was hard to miss Bradley Gitz’s column, “Racism to combat racism.” It featured a straw man dancing in a field of whataboutism.

First the straw man. Gitz argues that claims of systemic racism are the fruit of “cultural Marxism” and rest on “inherently illogical assumptions” of an expectation of perfectly proportionate distribution of outcomes among groups. Gitz then asserts that “such distributions have never been found in society at any point in history and could not be achieved even with the most unsavory and draconian means.” He therefore concludes that “the systemic racism concept … is fallacious.”

Thus, we are left with the clear implication, under Gitz’s reasoning, that there is either no disparity worth discussing or, alternatively, any observed disparity between groups is natural and right. The view that racial disparities are natural and immutable is consistent with the rather sordid history of the “cultural Marxism” thesis advanced by Gitz.

Gitz’s use of the “cultural Marxism” framework leads him to see systemic racism as a distributive justice problem involving disparities between groups. He completely ignores the fundamental problem of procedural injustice or unfairness experienced by an individual victimized by systemic racism. The harm of systemic racism is, first and foremost, the unfair treatment and injury of the individual. Gitz makes no effort to address these individual injustices.

In the whataboutism section of the article, Gitz cites — interesting but largely irrelevant — median household incomes for various American immigrant groups as evidence that the U.S. “can hardly be a country in which racism is as systemic as claimed.” What he didn’t include were median figures for native-born Black and white households.

Don’t look here, look over there at the dancing straw man.

EARL ANTHES

Forrest City