Our racial descent

Some general observations on the state of race relations in Amer- ica:

■ Our obsession with race seems to have actually increased despite racism having decreased over time by any objective assessment.

The central cause of this seeming paradox is the degree to which a political left that effectively controls our media and culture, and thus our public discourse, has embraced an identity politics stratagem that filters everything through a racial prism (with ethnicity/race replacing the class focus of the old Marxian left).

If racism really were as pervasive as claimed by the left, then cases of overt racism would seldom be newsworthy, but we know that even minor incidents involving claims of racial insensitivity or micro-aggressions (“Digital Blackface?!”) in the small crevices of American life now instantly receive national media attention.

Again, we can’t have it both ways— cases of racism are so rare as to be newsworthy or so common as to not be. If the latter, then we could conclude that little progress has been made; if the former a great deal has been, even if not as much or as quickly as we would like.

■ The left can’t acknowledge progress in combating racism because identity politics makes no sense without claims of pervasive racism and white supremacy. It would be pointless to sort everyone into racial categories (per intersectionality theory) unless you seek to convince people that society continues to be organized to the advantage of some races at the expense of others.

Because racial grievance and victimhood flow directly from identity politics, a left that has taken a deep plunge into identity politics must continue to depict America as an irrevocably racist land, even if it isn’t.

■ The inability to admit that racism has declined as an impediment to Black progress might in itself constitute the most serious impediment remaining to such progress because of the message it sends to Black Americans: that the system is so stacked against them that there is no point in trying to succeed within it.

Embracing the role of victim is always the quickest and easiest route to becoming one; in this sense careless and non-falsifiable claims of “systemic racism” encourage failure by providing a ready-made excuse for it.

We thus arrive at the possibility that the left’s approach to racism is actually increasing the racial disparities that it so often cites as evidence of racism.

There is a certain self-fulfilling prophecy at work here: Encourage a victim mentality that contributes to Black failure and then blame the resulting failure upon racism.

■ If racism affects everything around us, even to the point of being systemic, then the task of eradicating it becomes so overwhelming as to reduce the incentives to try.

The original civil rights movement was optimistic because it was based on the belief that progress was possible, that the conscience and moral sense of white Americans could be successfully appealed to.

In sharp contrast, identity politics denies the possibility of progress and replaces optimism with a deep, fatalistic pessimism. Rather than appeal to the better angels of our nature, it condemns “whiteness” and rejects the kind of color-blind, racially integrated society that Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders pursued (even to the point of labeling color-blindness itself racist).

The civil rights movement sought to end racism in America, but an end to racism is the very last thing that the practitioners of identity politics want (being an “anti-racist” is a less noble calling if there isn’t enough racism any longer to go around).

■ The tendency to look only where the light is shining (to always blame racism) prevents honest discussion of other factors that might be holding back Black progress and racial equality.

Perhaps the biggest of those ignored obstacles is a Black illegitimacy rate that has been hovering around 70 percent for the past quarter-century and which abundant research suggests is highly correlated with multi-generational poverty, criminality, and educational under-achievement.

The claim that such illegitimacy somehow also flows from racism falls apart when considering that Black and white illegitimacy rates were similar prior to the 1960s, and that the Black rate was still only 15 percent when Pat Moynihan issued his report on the looming disintegration of the Black family during the Johnson administration.

Jim Crow and segregation can’t be logically blamed for Black illegitimacy if Black illegitimacy didn’t explode until decades after Jim Crow and segregation were dismantled.

■ Just about everything social scientists have learned about socioeconomic progress suggests that the best means of avoiding poverty (and all the maladies that accompany it) is for people to adhere to a fairly simple life sequence: Stay in school, get a job, get married and only then have children. Follow that sequence and you are likely to avoid poverty; fail to and you are likely to end up impoverished, regardless of race.

If we truly wish to explain socioeconomic disparities between groups (Blacks, whites, Asian Americans, etc.), we might assess the extent to which each adheres to the school-job-marriage-kids sequence for success. But that would also suggest that Black Americans might be something other than helpless victims of white racism.

And we certainly can’t have that, can we?