The Politics of Racial Retribution
Between the end of the Civil War and 1896 racial segregation, both formal and informal was established throughout the South as a replacement for slavery. Beginning with the Plessy decision of that year, Jim Crow was given the blessing of the Supreme Court. In response, the states of the old Confederacy, led by the Democratic Party, formalized racial discrimination in virtually every aspect of social and business life. Meanwhile, beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, as blacks migrated out of the South to the big cities of the North, many white people, themselves often ethnic minorities and/or recent immigrants, reacted by expanding informal de facto discriminatory practices already long established, which persisted into the 1960s and beyond.
The Civil Rights Revolution beginning in the post war period notched a series of legal victories in the courts and in Congress that began with the Brown decision of 1954 and stretched over the next eleven years through the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These landmark events, essentially abolished the legal underpinnings of all discriminatory laws and practices in the United States, paving the way for the establishment of a color-blind society in which advancement would be based solely on talent and merit.
This was the point where the nation could have fulfilled its promise of equal opportunity and equal justice for all. It was a chance tragically lost. Not only could the nation have made good on the promise of equal opportunity missed during Reconstruction, but it also lost the chance to underwrite African American business prosperity in the big cities, subsidizing instead, welfare dependency and broken homes, with the resultant crime, drug addiction and despair we see every day.
This was when the nation passed through the looking glass, flipping the vision of the color-blind society into the racially obsessed dystopia we endure today. Given the nation’s dark racial past, perhaps the opportunity was illusory, but human beings make decisions, and since they can always decide differently, there was nothing inevitable about how things turned out. What the nation needed at this point in its history were leaders with the wisdom to avoid the perpetuation of discrimination and to guide its victims to the realization of “the blessings of liberty.”
Unfortunately, that’s not what the nation got. Instead, it got leaders who listened to those who called upon government to intervene in the private social sphere not simply to ensure equal treatment, but to “even the playing field,” by making up for past injustice. Accordingly, government, with widespread support from both Democrats and Republicans, launched wide ranging “affirmative action” programs and employment “set-asides,” in which the government tried to cure discrimination with more discrimination. What most failed to realize was that to do so was to expand discrimination and make it the law of the land. In a clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise to extend to all citizens, “the equal protection of the laws,” government spread discrimination everywhere, and infused a new form of racism into the daily lives of all Americans, setting citizen against citizen, especially in education and employment. Ironically, this took place at the very time that growing numbers of Americans, especially of the boomer generation, had acknowledged the evils of racial discrimination and were moving voluntarily to abolish it from both their public and private behaviors.
Chief Justice John Roberts once said that the only way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Instead of excising the cancer of racial discrimination, the nation’s political leaders chose to expand it and call it justice. As recently as 2003 in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court affirmed that colleges could employ “race-sensitive” admissions procedures so long as they were “narrowly tailored” and constituted only one among many admissions criteria. In short, discrimination in college admissions was still permissible. During the current term the Supreme court has an opportunity outlaw racial discrimination in higher education when it considers the cases of Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College. Perhaps this time the justices will do the right thing and set the nation on the path toward a color-blind society.
Meanwhile, both the state of California, and the city of San Francisco contemplate what are clearly unworkable and unconstitutional “reparations” schemes in jurisdictions where slavery never existed. Naturally, many blue cities across the nation are following suit.
One of the primary reasons racial discrimination continues to exist in the United States is because the federal government, along with the states and municipalities, mandate and subsidize it. Without the patronage of the federal government, the plague of race-based hiring and advancement, along with informal quota systems throughout American life would not exist. Likewise, such abominations as “critical race theory” would be confined to the imaginations of a handful of embittered radicals in the universities. The entire racial retribution business would not even exist but for government subsidies which foster its growth. Though it produces nothing of value, it nevertheless produces racial tensions and hostilities which Democrats cynically exploit for votes—just as they used to do in the Jim Crow South. What was once a demand for justice has morphed into a demand for retribution against those who had nothing to do with the imposition of discrimination in the first place. There can be little more divisive in any society.
The story does not end here by any means. While the demand for “justice,” began with those who had indeed experienced blatant injustice at the hands of Democrats particularly in the South, it quickly spread to many other racial minority groups who nursed grievances of their own against American society, a term that was redefined to mean an undifferentiated version of white society—as though there are no differences among white people—an observation that is itself testimony to the effectiveness of the “melting pot” ideal that is so scorned by diversity activists.
At this point I hasten to add that those demanding retribution and or spoils disguised as “justice,” are generally a small but noisy minority because most people, regardless of race, understand that you can’t cure an injustice with another injustice.
Meanwhile, demagogues exploit latent fears among black Americans that whites, led by the GOP, so the narrative goes, want to return to the days of slavery and segregation that were made and enforced by Democrats! A case in point was Joe Biden’s demagogic warning to African Americans attending a campaign rally in 2012 that should the GOP regain power, that they would “put you all back in chains.”
Further intensifying the situation, cynical Democratic politicians and stupid Republicans, illustrating the truth of the observation about “the evil party and the stupid party,” opened the doors to a huge influx of impoverished people from the “third world,” mostly non-white, who could also claim the status of victim, and access to the welfare state and the dependency it creates. Then, liberal Democrats, themselves predominantly white men, could swoop in and pose as champions of the newly oppressed “huddled masses,” while simultaneously appealing for their votes, and to the consciences of guilt-ridden white middle class voters.
These divisions are the illegitimate progeny of the efforts of self-serving Democrats to use the government to play one group off against another for political advantage, while disguising the entire project as an effort to atone for injustice and claim the moral high ground while simultaneously smearing anyone who might resist this narrative.
What is perhaps most galling about this insanity is that substantial majorities of Americans, of all backgrounds are content to live and let live in a colorblind society, sorting out their differences privately through hard work, talent, and merit during the ordinary course of their daily lives.
Yet, the demagogues can’t permit that. The grift is just too valuable.