Systemic Delusion – Part I

By Patrick Hall

The charge that America is a "systemically racist country" spouted by various race industry entrepreneurs, like the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, NAACP, NAN, leftist academicians, (a socio-political redundancy), our political class, and many within the mainstream media is fatiguing at best, and an outright fallacy to those of us who don't see the country through their prism of race. Those constituencies, who currently shout the loudest, seem to have the biggest megaphone on race matters. In many cases, it almost appears that they have some vested, if not perverted, interest in keeping racism alive.  It is the chosen cultural currency that they trade-in. America is not, nor is it even close to the Jim Crow segregated, or Pre-Civil Rights ethos, that was a feature in some parts of our nation.   It is more than disheartening that now in my 70s, many blacks and their Progressive Liberal cohorts talk as if America is seething with racism. It simply isn’t so!  

However, as we have seen over the past year, polities, mostly aligned with the Democratic Party, are spinning the yarn that racism is the signature problem facing black Americans in 2021.  During his inauguration address, President Biden sternly warned the nation about the rise of white supremacy. But in reality, looking at federal and state crime stats, the dangers emanating from white supremacist activities turn out to be a “Where’s Waldo” endeavor.

Here are some quick stats. In 2020 according to the Department of Justice, there were a total of 5 cases brought against white supremacists, with the total number of individuals charged is 14.  In 2019, the total number of white supremacy cases brought was 5, which led to 75 individuals being charged.  State statistics of white supremacist activities accumulated by the Department of Lawfare records a total of 8 cases brought against white supremacists, leading to 17 total charges in two years.  Juxtapose this with the thousands of individuals associated with BLM and Antifa arrested in 2020 in cities across the nation. They were not charged with anything after burning, looting, and the death of several individuals. The silence on the part of the Biden-Harris Administration has been culpable. Of course, Progressives, and too many within the Democratic political class, have given groups like Antifa and the BLM Global Foundation a peculiar “most favored rioter or protester ” status.

 What is equally deflating is that we have forgotten that our so-called racist nation elected a black man for President. We did it twice! Actually, for lack of a better term, Obama is multiracial.  But one cannot mention that in the interest of keeping alive the “one-drop-makes-you-black” canon, stubbornly held on to by many African Americans. It is a precious, if not one of the most foolish, if not dim-witted, heirloom courtesy of the Antebellum South.

Over the past half-century, the country as a whole has bent over backwards to accommodate African Americans and other students of color by essentially providing free college, backed-up by a legion of “Diversicrats” (i.e., Deans, Directors, and Coordinators of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), to soothe the fragile racial psyches of these students.

President Johnson’s Great Society Programs and the War of Poverty spent trillions of dollars targeted to mitigate the effects of “real discrimination and racism” directed toward blacks in places like the south and some Northern communities.  

Likewise, let’s not forget the benefits accrued from decades of affirmative action hiring policies. Although there have been some shortcomings associated with the implementation of the program, that is to say, it has largely turned out to be a public policy windfall for middle-class blacks, college-educated white women, and foreign nationals with the right skin tone. Nevertheless, affirmative action stands as an example of a society that is hardly endemically racist.

A Sidebar
[I began thinking about the way Pieter Willem Botha’s apartheid government in South African treated its black populace, or the tragedy initiated by Hitler’s the National “Socialist” German Workers Party (The Nazi ), on its Jewish population.  They didn’t provide these groups with many social programs, money, and special government sponsors set-asides like the United States has given blacks and other minorities for over a half-century. One could only conclude that the United States must be replete with some of the dumbest racists or white supremacists on earth. Why would a racist country provide such sweeping opportunities to a group, it supposedly holds some systemic racial animus?]

Besides, please think of the thousands of black politicians elected to public office over the last half-century, coupled with the black teachers and administrators, who run many of our city schools: albeit, sometimes into the ground.  Blacks are free to go anywhere in the country. Something that was not always possible when I was a child growing up in the 1950s.  Blacks and other minorities have been omnipresent on TV and are conspicuously present on all of our social media platforms. Once more, this was rare before the Civil Rights Movement. The United States also has the world's most Black millionaires.  Our nation stands in stark contrast to many third-world countries and some African nations, where the few millionaires have either embezzled or killed their way to their fortunes via some form of Kleptocratic governance.

With all the progress and "clear opportunities" afforded Americans, who happen to be black, one would think that would count for something. But apparently, it does not. America is still greeted with a kick-in-the-balls and accused continuously of being systemically racist: itself, a repurposed, intellectual dronish, and tiresome Marxist idea.

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I   Hall, Patrick. Against Our Best Interests: An Ambivalent view of Affirmative Action.  American Libraries,  October 1991: 898-902.
   Hall, Patrick.  I Can’t Spell Cat, But My Self-Esteem is High.  America Magazine, July 5-12, 1997:  14-15.
  Hall, Patrick.   Footnote From an Integrationist.  America Magazine, May 10, 1997: 16-17.

[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]