Meet the New Racists

By Catholic League president Bill Donohue 

Many conservatives deny that systemic racism exists. They are wrong. Racism runs deep into our institutions, and it explains why African Americans are being held back. 

Does this mean that the Left has the right analysis? No, it only means they have correctly identified a serious problem. Where the Left errs is in its diagnosis. Systemic racism today is largely the result of "progressive" initiatives, policies and laws. In other words, the Left is responsible for the malady it purports to abhor. They are the new racists. 

Dictionary.com defines racism as "a form of prejudice in which a person believes in the superiority of what they consider to be their own 'race' over others." That is what the Klan has long believed, and it is what the Left believes today, with one important difference: most of those who espouse this view are white, and it is their contention that while they are not racists, white America is. 

The Left is twice wrong: a) white America, like every segment of the country, is extraordinarily tolerant and fair-minded and b) this is not true of the new racists, namely, those who are indicting America. Here is the evidence. 

To combat racism, Idaho passed a law in April that bans schools from teaching that "any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior." Other states have since passed similar laws. 

Not too long ago, if someone were to object to what this Idaho law says, that person would be branded a racist. Today those who object include the National Education Association (the NEA), the nation's largest teachers' union, and virtually every politician, activist, and media outlet on the Left. It is they who have embraced the deeply racist agenda that marks critical race theory. 

Critical race theory, which will be taught in the schools this fall, thanks to the NEA, holds that white people today are inherently racist and are responsible for past racial injustices even if there is zero evidence that most white people have never discriminated against a single African American. Being white is all that counts. 

According to this perspective, there are no individuals in white America—just clusters of white people. In other words, it is the immutable characteristic of race that determines who we are, not the biographical data that makes us all unique individuals. If this isn't racist, the term has no meaning. 

Critical race theory, however, is only one weapon in the arsenal of the new racists. Others simply resort to hate speech. Their hatred of America is palpable. 

Over the Fourth of July weekend, one left-wing pundit and politician after another declared how racist America is. None was more forceful than Rep. Cori Bush, the newly elected black Democrat from Missouri; she quickly joined the Squad this year, the anti-American contingent of House Democrats. "Black people still aren't free," she exclaimed.   

To the extent that blacks are not free, is due almost exclusively to people like her. For example, blacks are the biggest victims of abortion and crime: she champions the former and wants to defund the police. She apparently does not care that innocent blacks pay the biggest price in both instances. 

Blacks are overrepresented in the armed forces and have served our nation with distinction; they have also used their service as a lever to achieve a middle-class status. She wants to defund the armed forces. Blacks strongly favor school choice, but Bush, who attended a Catholic high school, wants to deny poor blacks the right to go to a charter, private or parochial school. 

What Bush is promoting is systemic racism—it is baked into her policy preferences. Moreover, if she really believed that black lives matter, she would seek to curb the killing of innocent black lives in the womb, and would go into East St. Louis on a Saturday night demanding that blacks stop killing each other. Instead, she wants more funds for abortion and none for the police. Thus has she systematized racism. 

Nothing epitomizes systemic racism more than denying poor black people the right to compete equally with whites, Hispanics and Asians in school. Bush, however, wants to make sure that her own people are locked into failed public schools, the kinds of schools her parents rejected when they enrolled her in a Catholic school. 

The reality is that it is not white supremacists whom African Americans need to fear today—it is those who champion their cause. The new racists need to be outed, confronted and defeated. They are threat to the wellbeing of African Americans, and to the nation as a whole.