Tag Archive for: AntiWhiteRacism

The US Government Creates New Races

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Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

It has the divine power to create races but can’t fix the serious problems facing Americans.

The Book of Genesis has nothing on the US government.

The book tells the biblical story of how God created Adam, and, using one of his ribs, created Eve.  This happened in the Garden of Eden, which was probably located in sub-Saharan Africa, thus making the couple and their billions of descendants African.

Using its supernatural power, the US government is thinking of creating new “races.” It is not known if any ribs will be involved.

It is known, however, that one of the new races would be split off from an existing race, similar to how God split Eve from Adam.  The existing “race” would continue to be called White, and the new “race” would be called MENA, which stands for Middle East and North Africa.

The cockamamie notion behind the proposed split is that European Whites are a different race than MENA Whites.

At the same time, the current ethnic category of Hispanics would be miraculously transformed into a separate and distinct race.  In other words, the numerous ethnic groups, nationalities, and skin shades in the Hispanic category would become homogenous by decree. Hey, if Jesus could turn water into wine, the government can turn ethnicity into race?

These changes would leave the US with seven races:  White, MENA, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American.  This means that the hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in the world and in the US would be reduced to these arbitrary seven, in a mockery of diversity.

There is little basis in science for any of this, whether it is the science of genetics, anthropology, ethnography, or sociology.  But the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving US government doesn’t have to follow the science.

If the new races were to come to be, almost all of America’s institutions and citizens would obediently follow the government’s lead and, without question, begin to categorize themselves and everyone else accordingly.

After all, most Americans didn’t question the original six racial categories when they were first created.  Nor did they understand how the categories came to be and how they would be used for nefarious purposes.

I know the history, for the simple reason that over my career I was at the vanguard of equal rights and equal opportunity.  I saw firsthand how the categories interfered with those goals.

David E. Bernstein knows the history even better than I do.  He details the history in his scholarly book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.  What began as a noble effort to help African Americans overcome the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow turned into identity politics, in which other groups lobbied to be classified as disadvantaged races and minorities.  That in turn led to a feeding frenzy in which the groups fought for such racial spoils as race-based set-asides, small business loans, government contracts, and college preferences.

Today, the racial categories are used in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which is a misnomer, because the programs are intended to exclude Whites, even the roughly 30 million ones in poverty, and increasingly, to exclude Asians.

Admittedly, I take the exclusion personally.  You see, my impoverished and unskilled immigrant grandparents were considered non-White and treated accordingly when they immigrated to America.  The same for my working-class parents for much of their lives.  And the same for other Southern Europeans, as well as for Eastern Europeans, Jews, Armenians, and many others.  Now all of us are considered White, privileged, and racist.  It’s as if our DNA had been suddenly replaced by the DNA of Anglo-Saxons.

Curiously, Hispanics are not seen as White in the new racial scheme, although many of them have ancestors from a part of Europe that is at the same latitude as most of Italy, which is considered White by those obsessed with color.  As such, Hispanics escape being stereotyped as privileged and racist and aren’t blamed for slavery, although Hispanics brought more slaves to the Americas than the English and Dutch did—and began doing so long before 1619.

So, what is my real race?  The answer can be found in history and geography, but the government’s race classifiers apparently don’t know history and geography.  For example, they don’t seem to know how close North Africa is to Italy, or that invaders and traders from the Middle East and North Africa spread their DNA across the Italian peninsula over millennia, as did Greeks, Persians, Goths, Gauls, Neanderthals, and others.  Romans also spread their DNA in other lands, including in England, where they taught the locals how to bathe.

Anyway, to answer the question, my race is a mongrel.

It’s a similar story of cross-fertilization and genetic exchange throughout history and throughout the world.  Take the most prolific DNA spreader in history, Genghis Khan.  One of every 200 people alive today has some of Khan’s DNA. His empire, the Mongolian Empire, covered the largest amount of contiguous territory in history, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Danube, to the Persian Gulf.  Mongolians were colonizers par excellence.

Present-day Mongolians are not into cancel culture and the removal of statues of notorious people in their history.  They are proud of their warrior history and their subjugation of other peoples.  That’s evidenced by the stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan on horseback, which is located 33 miles from the nation’s capital.  The statue is 130 ft. tall and is on top of a three-story museum/monument.  Visitors can walk up a stairway through the horse’s chest and neck to reach a vantage point with a panoramic view of the countryside.

So, what race are Mongolians?  Are they Asian?  Well, in spite of what the US government believes, Asia is a geographical area, not a race.

These questions about Mongolians are very germane to the issue of the government’s seven races.  That’s because the word “Mongoloid” is derived from the word “Mongol” and was once used to designate a race.  Here’s what Wikipedia says about that:

Mongoloid is an obsolete racial grouping of various peoples indigenous to large parts of Asia, the Americas, and some regions in Europe and Oceania. The term is derived from a now-disproven theory of biological race. In the past, other terms such as “Mongolian race”, “yellow”, “Asiatic” and “Oriental” have been used as synonyms.

The concept of dividing humankind into the Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid races was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History. It was further developed by Western scholars in the context of racist ideologies during the age of colonialism. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: “The belief in ‘races’ as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past.”

Mongolian Americans expose the fallacy and lie of DEI, which claims to want social, economic, and political justice for so-called minorities.  Mongolian Americans are a true minority, in that they have small numbers and little political power.  Yet they are forgotten in pushes for diversity on boards of directors, in college admissions, and in political offices.  Virtue-signaling companies don’t feature them in TV commercials and ads.  No one takes to the streets on their behalf.  And, to add insult to injury, their heritage is erased by force-fitting them into one of the official “races.”

Mongolian Americans are not the only forgotten people.  Scores of other true minority groups are also forgotten.  The “minority” groups that are not forgotten are the ones that have large numbers and considerable political and media power.

I’ll end on a personal note

My immediate family includes a married couple who would be characterized as an interracial couple by those who see everyone in terms of the government’s official races.  My wife and I see them as loved ones and good people.

They will soon be the parents of a baby girl.  She will not fit into any of the official racial categories, but the government and the DEI industry will want to assign her to one.

They should mind their own business and stop playing God.

White Man Down: Frustration Is Not Racism

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Editors’ Note: Larry Elder, the author of this article, is an African American and a prominent conservative writer, speaker, talk show host and former candidate for Governor of California.

 

About Scott Adams, the white male creator of the (once) popular “Dilbert” comic strip, The Washington Post wrote:

On his Feb. 22 episode of “Real Coffee With Scott Adams,” the creator of the comic strip “Dilbert” decided to riff on a much-criticized Rasmussen poll and promote a type of segregation. He declared that Black Americans are part of a “hate group” and urged White people to “get the hell away from Black people.”

National Public Radio condemned Adams’ “racist rant.” His distributor dropped him after several outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, stopped carrying the strip. Adams later said his comments were “hyperbole,” but the damage was done.

About the “much criticized” Rasmussen Poll, it asked American adults the following question: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white.’” Eighty-one percent of white of American adults strongly or somewhat agree, 7% strongly or somewhat disagreed and 13% responded, “not sure.” As for blacks, 53% strongly or somewhat agree, 26% strongly or somewhat disagree and 21% of blacks responded, “not sure.”

In interpreting the poll, Adams confusingly said, “If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with white people … that’s a hate group.” Twenty-six percent of blacks strongly or somewhat disagreeing is not “nearly half.” Also, Adams made no comment on the nearly 20% of whites who either strongly or somewhat disagree or are not sure whether “it’s OK to be white.” Presumably, Adams would not want them as neighbors either.

Adams said a lot of things in his “racist tirade,” including that he tried to be supportive of blacks, but felt his efforts were not appreciated:

So I think it makes no sense whatsoever, as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. And so, I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like I’ve been doing it all my life and the only outcome is I get called a racist.

He also said he is kindred spirits with those who believe in hard work and merit.

Do you really think Adams, a former Bernie Sanders supporter, is the only white person who feels this sense of frustration? After all, we have had affirmative action or race-based preferences now for over 50 years. And some black students want separate dorms and graduation ceremonies. How is that different from what Adams said?

Nearly every major city from New York to Los Angeles has or has had a black mayor, with many having or having had black police chiefs. Yet, when a black suspect was mistreated recently in Memphis, the black mayor of Los Angeles suggested the cops would have reacted differently had the suspect not been black. Never mind the cops and the Memphis police chief are black.

In Baltimore in 2015, black suspect Freddie Gray died in police custody. The mayor was black; the number one and number two in charge of the police department were black; three of the six officers charged were black; the police department is majority minority; City Council is all Democrat, majority black; the state attorney who brought the charges was black; the judge before whom two of the officers tried their case, and who found them not guilty, was black; and U.S. attorney, Loretta Lynch, was black, as was then-President Barack Obama. Yet despite all these black players and decision-makers, the Department of Justice announced a civil rights investigation.

At a time when anti-black racism has never been less of a factor, most blacks demand reparations, properly described as payments from those who were never slave owners to be given to those who were never slaves. Schools promote concepts like critical race theory that characterize whites as oppressors and blacks as victims. Some blacks complain about “microaggressions.” If in response to “Black Lives Matter,” a white person says, “All Lives Matter,” all hell breaks loose.

Is it really surprising that some whites, like Adams, are now saying, “Check, please!”? He just said it out loud. Frustration is not racism.

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This article was published by Chronicles and is reproduced with permission.

“Caught Red-Handed”: Blue Cross Blue Shield Backtracks On Racist Grant Program, Opens Up To White People

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Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

Earlier this week, the leader of a medical watchdog organization called out Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of North Carolina over a racist grant program which only applied to organizations run by non-whites.

“If ever there was a bad idea, the notion that we should start to separate our country along racial lines is amongst the worst,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean for curriculum at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The $300,000 grant program, called “Advancing Healthy Food Equity” (AHFE), disqualified any organization with a white CEO from participating, while the community directly served by the program must also not be white.

“This opportunity is specifically designed to support community-rooted organizations that are led by, serving, and accountable to American Indians, Black, Latino, other People of Color, and members of immigrant communities, to increase their ability to engage in advocacy to address the root causes of inequitable access to healthy food,” said a spokesperson for the grant in a promotional video.

Now, BCBS has backpedaled – and has changed its policy of excluding white-run organizations from applying for a new grant program.

According to Laura Morgan, program manager for Do No Harm (DNH)—an organization that investigates and spotlights discriminatory practices in medical institutions, BCBS “got caught red-handed when they tried to inject ugly racial politics into their grant-making process,” the Epoch Times reports.

“Discrimination should have no place in our society, yet they were prepared to reject grant applications from nonprofits led by white CEOs just because of their skin color,” Morgan continued. “Do No Harm, along with BCBS customers and North Carolina state policymakers, will be watching very closely how the foundation updates the grant’s eligibility criteria”…..

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Continue reading this article at Zero Hedge.

Blaming White Racism

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Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The killing of Tyre Nichols is a horrific continuation of American black-on-black crime.

Many commenters on the Left have situated the arrest of Tyre Nichols—the black man who was evidently beaten to death by five Memphis police officers, also black—as a racial issue. White supremacy, they say, does not require the presence of white people to effect its ugliness, because black people—especially those working in a structurally racist institution such as policing—internalize the racist attitudes of whites. There is, according to these pundits, a close parallel between the Nichols case and other abuse cases involving white cops and black victims, because many blacks absorb racist views about blacks and enact them against their own race as enforcers of white supremacy.

It makes more sense to interpret the beatings that resulted in this young man’s death as another case of black-on-black crime. Those five black police officers constituted a gang of thugs which unleashed its viciousness against an innocent victim. This is the trauma many blacks in inner cities suffer every day from the gang members who prey on their neighborhoods.

Blacks targeting other blacks for murder is the most systemic form of racial profiling that exists in the U.S. today. Black-on-black crime is a national security disaster and risk. It betrays a deep current of black self-hatred that expresses itself in homicidal rage turned largely against black people.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the offending rate for blacks (the number of blacks who commit homicide as a percentage of the population) was almost eight times higher than that for whites, and the victim rate six times higher. Most homicides were intraracial, with 84 percent of white victims killed by whites, and 93 percent of black victims killed by blacks.

Racial profiling of blacks by other blacks is systemic and pervasive in the black community. One hears it in the music where the black gang lifestyle, murders, sexploitation, explicit and graphic sexual depictions of blacks, drugs, and violence are routinely celebrated and consumed in the black community. There is, as far as I can tell, no other aesthetic analogue in any other culture—not where members of a race or ethnicity celebrate and encourage each other to murder their own kind, hyper-sexualize each other, and sell, steal, and consume drugs; not where a lifestyle predicated on the degradation of one’s in-group is a constitutive feature of the culture.

During an appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday, January 29, 2023, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan lamented the beating death of Nichols at the hands of the five Memphis police officers. Speaking with host Chuck Todd, the Republican legislator stated, “I don’t know that there’s any law that can stop that evil that we saw,” before adding, “but no amount of training’s going to change what we saw in that video.”

Jordan has been criticized for being offensive and insensitive in saying that. But perhaps he has a point. Evil cannot be legislated away. It can be punished when it violates the rights of others, but the brokenness and the evil that those officers carry within themselves are rooted deeply. They maliciously executed a beating they knew could kill a slightly built man. No law, at least not in a free society, can uproot the aesthetic debauchery or the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the black community in the United States.

It is not the case, of course, that black American culture has to be this way, nor that it always has been this way. This cultural indigence derives largely from the way that leftists have resolutely made excuses for the worst outcomes for African Americans, insisting that all of it was a result of and reaction to white racism. Everything good and wholesome about black life—the sense of mutual aid, bettering one’s station, and the importance of family and marriage—was denigrated as a kind of false consciousness. Brutish misery was promoted as black authenticity.

Perhaps Jim Jordan was speaking elliptically, for he knew that if he spoke openly he might be rebuked and censured. Yes, of course there are good black police officers who have emerged from a broken and bankrupt culture; one cannot steep oneself too deeply in stereotypes. But stereotypes hold some degree of truth to them. The gang that killed Tyre Nichols derives from a bereft culture, a culture where blacks seem to be represented everywhere, where white supremacy penetrates every sphere of public and private life. But laser focused attention needs to be aimed at a parallel society existing concurrently in the USA.

When we speak of black American culture today, we are talking about a culture that is broken, bereft of values, moral heft, and sustained leadership. It is self-destructing. It is a thug culture that contributes little of any intellectual, aesthetic, or moral value to the world at large. The gang of five police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are the most eloquent manifestation of its ethos.

When asked what comes to mind when we think of black culture in America today, many of us would rather not say, because the answers are stark, dark, and devoid of much we would care to pass on to future generations. So we should not be surprised that thugs dressed in uniforms are no different than the ones with their pants hanging low below their waists who roam the streets terrorizing innocent citizens.

Congressman Jordan is correct. There might not be any laws to eradicate the evil depicted in the video showcasing the killing of Tyre Nichols. There are, however, radical solutions that can be entertained; solutions our society may rather not be ready to consider and implement. They might ask us to ponder the question of who gets let into the future, and who remains outside the realm of admission into civilized society.

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This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

Racial Alchemy

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Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Editors’ Note: Lest anyone think we don’t have a problem today, just look at the recent remarks of the rap singer Kayne West. Or for that matter, the University of California at Berkeley and its antisemitic agenda. Or, Harvard and its admission discrimination against Asians. Culturally, we see a new regime of discrimination coming from left-wing “anti-racists” like Ibram Kendi, who contend the only way to fight past discrimination is with discrimination in the present. The Democrat Party is the primary vehicle for this movement in the political realm. Sadly, this is not the first time Democrats pushed a racist agenda (slavery, Jim Crow, Ku Klux Klan, et al) and it should be vigorously opposed. In the private sector, all we can do is request that people judge others by their character and their merit, not by the hue of their skin or their ethnic background. However, our government, which has a monopoly on the use of force, and those agencies the government funds, should absolutely get out of the racial category business and the racial spoils system in which it is currently engaged. Equality before the law and equal treatment by the government, both founding principles, should be the policy. The fact that this ideal was imperfectly executed in the past is no reason to promote it or tolerate it in the present.

 

How non-white victims of racism were transformed into white racists.

For much of the twentieth century, a number of ethnocultural groups now seen as white were seen as non-white. As such, they were subjected to ugly racial slurs and worse, and, in the true meaning of the word “racism,” were viewed and treated as inherently inferior by the ruling establishment of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

The maligned included Italians, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Slavs, and others. They hailed from Europe or Asia Minor, unlike other victims of racism in America, such as Mexicans, Chinese, and, most egregiously, Africans.

Italians bore the brunt of the bigotry, because they were the largest immigrant group at the time, with more than two million of them coming to America in just the first decade of the twentieth century. (My maternal and fraternal grandparents came in the next decade.) Moreover, the vast majority of them were from hardscrabble southern Italy and were mostly unskilled, uneducated, illiterate, and dark-complected.

If there is any doubt that Italians and others were seen as non-white, consider an Alabama case in the 1920s.  A black man was convicted of violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law for marrying a white woman. His conviction was overturned on appeal when evidence was presented that she was Sicilian and thus not white. 

Or fast-forward 40 years to 1965, when Southern racists said that Vivian Liberto Cash, the wife of famed country singer Johnny Cash, was a black woman, due to her swarthy complexion and facial features. She claimed that she was Sicilian, as her maiden name and ancestry indicated. (Years later, DNA tests on their daughter Roseanne showed that Vivian’s maternal great-great-grandmother had been an enslaved black woman who had illegally married a white man.)

On a personal note, four years prior to the Cash controversy, this writer of advanced age worked as a teen at an exclusive St. Louis country club, on an otherwise all-black staff of janitors, porters, cooks, and waiters.  Italians, blacks, Jews, and Catholics weren’t welcome as members. At least the club’s discrimination was an improvement over the injustice of 1891, when eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans.

Because the aforementioned groups are now considered white, new stereotypes apply to them. No longer stereotyped as inferior, they are now stereotyped as privileged, racist, and fragile—stereotypes that subject them to critical race theory and mandatory anti-racist training while excluding them from diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

It’s as if some sort of racial alchemy has occurred to magically transform them from being victims of racism to being racists.

To add current insults to past injuries, many of the promulgators of the new stereotypes are descendants of the WASPs who had promulgated the old stereotypes. Many of them are also progressive elites, just as many of their forebears were progressive elites. As will be shown, that’s a fact and not a partisan or political or ideological opinion.

A first blush, it would seem to be self-defeating for white progressive elites to promulgate negative stereotypes of whites and to endorse critical race theory, anti-racist training, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. But as influential leaders in government, industry, media, and academia, they not only go unscathed but are rewarded and praised for adopting and disseminating the new stereotypes.

A similar intellectual somersault has taken place in American universities, especially prestigious ones. They were leaders in maligning the aforementioned groups and discriminating against them.  But now they embrace a woke ideology that maligns the same groups in a different way.   

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the woke universities, in spite of a former president of the university, Francis Walker, being decidedly unwoke. He was one of the progressives of the early twentieth century who saw Italians and other southern Europeans as inferior. He warned that WASPs were committing “race suicide” by allowing the mass immigration of “progeny-producing, macaroni-eating Tonio,” a reference to Italians with vowels at the end of their names. He also said that southern Europeans were “beaten men of beaten races.” Lamenting the declining birthrate of WASPs, he asked rhetorically why they would want to bring children into a world populated by immigrants who were “unfit to be members of any decent community.”

The source of the foregoing anecdote is the acclaimed 2019 book by Daniel Okrent: The Guarded Gate:  Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and other European Immigrants Out of America. Okrent can’t be accused of being a conservative or right-winger. He was an editor at the New York Times, an editor at large at Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. His grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe.   

The law referenced in the book’s title is the 1924 Immigration Act, which was expressly intended to stop the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, among others. It’s a sign of current times that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is often mentioned by the media and academia as an example of racism, but the 1924 act goes largely unmentioned. That’s because the Chinese, or in today’s parlance, Asians, are portrayed as minorities who have suffered from bigotry; but the ethnocultural groups affected by the 1924 act are not seen as minorities who have suffered from bigotry.

That’s changing, however. Asians are now starting to be seen as white—not in terms of physical features but in terms of having similar values as upper-income whites regarding education, work, and family. Due to their rise to the top in income and test scores, they are being discriminated against in college admissions and are no longer automatically considered disadvantaged minorities for purposes of diversity and inclusion.

An anecdote in The Guarded Gate shows how history repeats itself but in an opposite direction. At the start of the twentieth century, German Jews in New York City had become fairly assimilated into WASP society due to their higher education and secular leanings. Because they felt that impoverished orthodox Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe were giving Jews a bad name, they formed an organization in 1907 to fund the shipping of the new emigrants to Galveston, Texas, where they would then be transferred to other towns in the Southwest and West. In all, 10,000 were shipped to Texas over seven years. Fast-forwarding to 2022, the governor of Texas has bused Latin American migrants to New York City, to make a point about the Lone Star State being inundated with migrants crossing the border illegally.

Most of The Guarded Gate details the evils of the eugenics movement in the US, identifies the progressive elites and prestigious universities behind the movement, and connects their racist thinking to the racial policies of the Nazis—which is ironic, considering that today’s progressives readily label their political opponents as fascists. It is a chilling account.

One of the notable founders of the eugenics movement was Henry Cabot Lodge, who would become an honored US senator. He was joined by other esteemed Boston Brahmins, elite New Yorkers, and other WASPs of similar standing and social class.

Francis Amasa Walker was one of Lodge’s colleagues. His credentials included the past positions of brigadier general, the first president of the American Economic Association, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, the director of the U.S. Census, and the third president of MIT. An article of his in the Yale Review described eastern and southern European immigrants as “vast masses of filth” who came from “every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe.”

As the book makes clear, Margaret Sanger was an early adherent of eugenics, a fact that gets politicized because of the polarized issue of abortion. Among other statements of support, she said that her birth control movement and the eugenics movement “should be and are the right and left hand of one body.” And she wrote in an essay in Birth Control Review that “the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.”

Eugenics was purported to be based on science, but it was bogus science. Its core notion was that humans could be bred like Gregor Mendel’s peas to have more traits that were desirable and fewer traits that were undesirable. Naturally, desirable traits were those that the ruling WASPs already had, and undesirable ones were those that the non-white immigrants had.

If that wasn’t frightening enough, the darker side of eugenics advocated that imbeciles, criminals, and other seriously flawed people not be allowed to procreate. That led to forced sterilizations.

A side note: One of the most powerful scenes in movie history was a scene in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” the film that dramatized the trial of Nazi leaders after the Second World War. In justifying the Nazi practice of sterilizing undesirables, the defense cited the American practice of doing the same. A man who had been sterilized by the Nazis for being feeble-minded was called to the stand. The actor Montgomery Clift played the man in a tour de force of acting, in which he exuded anguish, embarrassment, fear, and confusion.

Eugenicists loved to judge people by various traits and contrived measures of intelligence and then put them into categories and treat them accordingly. They also excelled at convincing the nation’s major institutions that their methods were scientific and would lead to a better society.

The eugenics movement reflected the impulse of progressives to use government coercion to re-engineer people to fit their notions of a perfect society. That is quite different from the classical liberal idea of accepting the realities of human nature and instituting a pluralistic political system that allows people to flourish in their own way while protecting their person, property, and civil liberties from those who want to harm them.

The progressive impulse to categorize continues today, most noticeably in the widespread use and unquestioning acceptance of the six categories of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native Americans—categories that are an incoherent mix of skin color, ethnicity, geographic origin, and the social construct of race.

Under today’s identity politics and woke thinking, everyone in the White category is considered privileged, consciously and subconsciously racist, responsible for the historical social injustices committed against the other categories, and in need of shaming and reeducation. Everyone in the other five categories is seen as the opposite: a victim of white racism and privilege, a disadvantaged person of color, and someone deserving of special treatment in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

In closing, the following recent incident illustrates the point.

In October 2022, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate by the name of Rick Caruso was interviewed on Telemundo. Naturally, the interviewer brought up race and referred to Caruso as white. Caruso corrected him and said that he was Italian, which meant that he was also Latin.

Of course, Caruso was ridiculed in the press and on social media.

Granted, it probably wasn’t wise for someone running for political office in these woke times to break the rules on race, to step out of his assigned category, and to expect voters to think beyond the official six categories, to know the origin of Latin, and to know enough history to know that Italians were once seen as non-white.

Perhaps Caruso was unwise, but he wasn’t the one who deserved to be ridiculed.

White Fragility: Unpacking the Kafka Traps of Robin DiAngelo’s NYT Bestseller

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Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Robin DiAngelo’s popular book ‘White Fragility’ breaks from the established rules of scholarship in several way

The biggest issue with Robin DiAngelo’s New York Times bestseller White Fragility is that it throws the rules of good scholarship out the window. That’s a bold claim, but multiple quotes from DiAngelo’s book readily back this up.

If You’re White You’re Racist

DiAngelo’s biggest claim is that, if you’re white, you’re automatically and unavoidably racist. Now to be clear, DiAngelo doesn’t mean that all white people have a conscious anti-minority bias. Rather, she claims that all white people employ racist assumptions and patterns that harm people of color and display an underlying bias.

To quote DiAngelo: “racism is unavoidable and…it is impossible to completely escape having developed problematic and racial assumptions and behaviors.” Speaking of herself (DiAngelo is white), she says, “I also understand that there is no way for me to avoid enacting problematic (racial) patterns.”

If DiAngelo, an affiliate professor of education at the University of Washington, were simply outing her own biased patterns, that would be one thing. Where her argument breaks the rules of good scholarship is that she makes it in a way that’s unfalsifiable.

DiAngelo considers multiple objections to her claim that all white people are racist. What if you’re married to a black person, have black children, do mission work in Africa, or marched during the Civil Rights Movement? She rejects all of these objections. That is, if you’re white, even if you have a black spouse and adopt black children and risk life and limb helping poor people in Africa (many of my friends are missionaries, and missionary life as a rule is neither safe nor well-paying), you’re still racist.

For DiAngelo, you are racist even if you actively try to promote racial equality—for instance, by marching with Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s. If you’re white, there is no way for you to not be racist.

A good scholar will present a hypothesis and test it. This is the scientific method, and it applies as much to the social sciences (DiAngelo is a sociologist) as to the physical sciences. The reason scholars do this is that we’re all human, and none of us has all the answers. Therefore, we must discuss and debate ideas, and marshal evidence for and against them, in order to reach the truth. At the root of good scholarship is the humility to accept that you might not have the world completely figured out.

DiAngelo takes a different tack. She presents her hypothesis as axiomatic and therefore as beyond question. If you’re white, you’re racist; full stop.

DiAngelo further breaks from the established rules of scholarship by explicitly adopting a mentality of: believe all accusers.

DiAngelo says that if you’re accused of racism, the only acceptable response is to thank the person for pointing out your racism and to promise to do better. For DiAngelo, acceptable responses include, “I appreciate this feedback,” “It is inevitable that I have this pattern. I want to change it,” “This is very helpful,” “Thank you,” and “I have some work to do (so as to stop enacting this racist behavior in the future).”

And to be clear, these are all great responses if the accusation is valid. If you make a racist joke (for instance, you walk into a primarily black movie theater and claim it’s like walking into Planet of the Apes, like Joe Rogan did), and people point it out, you should sincerely apologize and try to do better (as Rogan did).

The problem is that accusations aren’t always true. Sometimes the person making the accusation has misunderstood the situation. They might mishear, lack context, or simply have an underlying assumption that’s incorrect. We are all human, both those making accusations and those on the receiving end. Accusations need to be weighed on their merits, not just assumed to be true.

DiAngelo’s approach is a refutation of the idea of, “innocent until proven guilty.” But it’s bigger than that, too. It’s a rejection of the scientific method, wherein claims (even claims such as, “John’s a racist”) are weighed according to things like evidence and can be disagreed with.

If you’re accused of racism, under DiAngelo’s approach, even asking a third party to weigh in is considered unacceptable. DiAngelo says that sometimes, if someone calls her a racist, she’s tempted to ask another person of color for their perspective. But she dismisses this urge as “inappropriate” and something that “upholds racism.”

Even weirder, for DiAngelo, denial of the accusation of racism is proof of your racism. In a telling passage, DiAngelo talks about, “white people who think they are not racist, or are less racist, or are in the ‘choir’ or already ‘get it’.” Those people, she asserts, “cause the most daily damage to people of color.”

That is: if you deny that you are racist, you are part of the group that (according to DiAngelo) does more actual damage to people of color than the KKK.

This is a logical fallacy known as a Kafka trap. A Kafka trap is when someone is accused of something, and if they defend themselves then it’s considered proof of their guilt.

Crucially and disturbingly, DiAngelo doesn’t play by her own rules on this one. John McWhorter, a black conservative and Columbia University professor, wrote a review of White Fragility in The Atlantic that accuses the book of racism. The review is titled, “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility” and includes lines like this: “Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome.”

When an interviewer brought up McWhorter’s criticism, DiAngelo dismissed it. Her response: “I think that that is a disingenuous reading on the part of John McWhorter.”

And to be clear, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with saying that a critic is being disingenuous. But notice how sharply her response differs from the range of acceptable responses that she offers her white readers. Kafka trap rules for thee, but not for me.

Besides the idea that all white people are racist and that any accusation of racism must be accepted (unless it’s a black conservative calling DiAngelo racist), there’s a third core of the book that’s in some ways equally troubling: another Kafka trap.

DiAngelo argues that, if you’re white, you are automatically fragile when it comes to any discussion of race. She uses the term “white fragility” to describe how difficult she finds it in her workshops to get white people to talk about race, racial identities, and racial hierarchies in the United States.

And to be clear, having real conversations about race can be difficult. It’s something that many Americans don’t want to talk about, and probably a majority of those Americans have white skin. But just like the rest of her book, DiAngelo takes what could be a nuanced point and approaches it without any respect for the ideals of good scholarship.

How does she claim this fragility manifests? Via behaviors and emotions such as “argumentation” “silence” “leaving the stress-inducing situation (that is, the room where the person is being informed of how fragile they are),” “guilt” “tears” and “anger.”

That is: if you’re white, you are fragile. If you disagree that you’re fragile, it’s proof of your fragility. If you agree, of course that’s proof of your fragility too. If you remain silent, it’s also proof of your fragility.

DiAngelo doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that someone might disagree with her argument, not because they’re fragile, but because her argument is simply flawed. Are some white people fragile? Of course. Do all 204 million white Americans share such similar psychology that you can accuse them all of the same character flaw, and do so with such confidence that disagreement is seen as just more proof of your rightness? That’s a little more difficult.

Weirdly, even wanting to promote racial equality is a sign of white fragility. For DiAngelo, the guilt is the point; if you’re white, the work is to embrace this guilt. And, “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions'” is one of the patterns at the, “foundation of white fragility.”

The idea that white people are innately fragile would be a bold hypothesis even if she tried to back it up. But in practice, it’s just one more unfalsifiable claim.

The other big issue with DiAngelo’s book is that I got a consistent sense, from the stories she told, that her empathy for her fellow human was tied to skin color. In Chapter 8, she tells a story of how she co-facilitated a workshop and one participant described herself as being, “falsely accused” of racism. Apparently being accused of racism by the workshop leaders was not a trivial thing for this participant. As DiAngelo reports:

“Her friends wanted to alert us to the fact that she was in poor health and ‘might be having a heart attack.’ Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally. These coworkers were sincere in their fear that the young woman might actually die as a result of the feedback.”

How did DiAngelo respond to the fact that a white woman might have died during one of her workshops? I don’t know how she responded in the moment, but in the book she described it as a, “cogent example of white fragility.” She bemoaned how it took attention away from the people of color in the room: “Of course when news of the women’s (sic) potentially fatal condition reached the rest of the participant group, all attention was immediately focused onto her and away from engagement with the impact she had had on the people of color.”

If someone almost dies in your workshop and your response is to complain how it distracts from the real issues in the room, you may want to check your priorities. More perniciously, if your empathy for a potentially dying human being is tied to their skin color (I’m hopeful that DiAngelo would respond less breezily to a black woman almost dying because of her actions), then that’s a huge problem–and that’s true whatever the skin color in question is.

To be clear, there are genuine racial barriers in the United States, and in a lot of ways black Americans and white Americans receive unequal seats at the table. In her book The New Jim Crow, for instance, former United States Supreme Court clerk Michelle Alexander documents the existence of phenomena like white privilege and systemic racism in the criminal justice system. And those barriers are things we should all be trying to fix. But DiAngelo’s book, full of calls to self-flagellate and light on actual ideas, is unlikely to get us there.

*****

This article was published by FEE, Foundation for Economic Education and is reproduced with permission.

I’m not a Racist – I Just Don’t Like Certain People

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Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

The real racists in America are those who judge people on their pigmentation.

Being white, or olive, or beige, or swarthy, or whatever color has been affixed to this Italian by woke affixers who care deeply about pigment but have no original thoughts about pigment and thus simply parrot prevailing pigment pabulum, it’s impermissible for me to claim that I’m not a racist.

Why? Because, according to critical race theory, anyone with the wrong pigmentation is ipso facto a racist if he denies being a racist. The right pigmentation is black or the pigmentation of so-called people of color, however, they and their color are defined.

Well, I’m going to say it anyway: I’m not a racist! However, I will admit that I don’t like certain people, as will be demonstrated herein.

Those who speak about racism should define the term, especially those who call others a racist, as well as those who claim not to be a racist.

New definitions of “racism” are in vogue, but let’s go with the old one:

racism: believing that a certain race is inherently, or genetically, inferior in some way, whether in intelligence, morals, industriousness, or some other trait or characteristic.

Now some science: As a matter of genetics, anthropology, and archeology, race is mostly a social construct with little basis in biology, especially where it really matters.  Moreover, the DNA that makes us human, at least where it really matters, came from one source in sub-Saharan Africa before spreading to the Fertile Crescent, where it turned east and west and eventually spread around the world.

That makes all of us African.

Sure, some of us, myself included, have 3% or so of Neanderthal DNA, but that’s not enough to make us genetically inferior, or at least I hope not unless we’re members of Congress or the CEO of Facebook

As DNA traveled around the world, facial features, skin color, hair color, and body type and size changed from one geographic area to another, in a Darwinian process that only geneticists and evolutionary biologists understand. Those superficial characteristics get confused with race.

It’s even more confusing in a multiracial country like the U.S., where tens of millions of people of different colors have mixed their chromosomes together, thus creating more shades of color than Sherwin-Williams carries. On the other hand, it’s less confusing in a country like Iceland, where there is little diversity.

Speaking of Iceland, I went there one time to teach management classes to just about every human resources manager in the country. I was a person of color compared to the attendees and the general population. It is a nation of high trust and low crime. In fact, it has averaged less than one homicide per year for the last 20 years. Maybe that’s because there aren’t many Italians, or, I should say, Sicilian mobsters, who, by the way, are some of the people that I dislike, as will be discussed momentarily.

First, to continue our story of the great migration of DNA: The idea of race became even more muddled as people divided into clans, tribes, ethnicities, cultures, classes, religions, and nationalities. And it became more muddled still as these subdivisions began attacking each other, subjugating each other, and killing each other. Those who were early adopters of cannons, warships, a central treasury, and an administrative state were more efficient at this than those who didn’t.

Sometimes, the victims and victimizers had the same color and features; sometimes different colors and features.

Those of the same color and features found some other way of distinguishing between friend and foe, such as religion, ideology, class, dress, customs, or even whether they had a bone through their nose versus one through their lips. Or take present-day America, where those with studs, rings, and tattoos all over their face are in a different tribe than those who drive a Tesla to Whole Foods and then go home to eat arugula, ride a Peloton, and virtue signal about social justice in order to rise in the social hierarchy of those who think as they do.

Naturally, people who have been victimized by people of a different color will tend to dislike all people of that color, even if a specific individual of that color had nothing to do with the injustice. And even when the victimization happened generations ago, the resentment and distrust can remain extant, especially when facts and folklore are embellished by those who benefit from divisiveness, such as race hucksters, bureaucrats at the EEOC, consultants on critical race theory, and directors of diversity and inclusion—all of whom have an incentive to perpetuate racism.

Incidentally, Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, determined that the university has nearly 100 diversity administrators.

It’s also natural for people who have victimized people of a different color to see the victim as less than human, in order to justify their actions. To take one example out of scores of examples from history, slave owners in the American South and throughout the Spanish Empire saw Africans that way. Then, to reinforce the bias, they kept their slaves from being educated and split their families apart, to keep them from improving their lot and from showing that the bias had no basis in fact.

The caste system in India is another example. aOr take Brazil, where blacks with lighter skin see themselves as superior to blacks of darker skin.

The poor schooling of African Americans continued in America in the Jim Crow era and continues to some extent today. At the same time, the very serious socioeconomic problem of fractured black families also continues today, aided and abetted by misguided welfare programs. The people responsible for the bad design of the programs portray themselves as being woke about social justice but are largely silent about the tragic consequences of the programs. Maybe they’re like the former slave owners who didn’t want blacks to prove that they could survive without them.

None of this is very profound, probably because I’m of average intelligence, perhaps due to those Neanderthal genes. So far, though, in spite of being average, this commentary is deeper and more honest than what passes for intellectual discourse on race today—which shows how awful the discourse is.

Continuing with the de minimus profundity, here’s another fact that is overlooked by the hate-whitey-woke crowd: that it’s hard to come up with a race or ethnocultural group that didn’t brutalize, oppress, and subjugate other groups. Certainly not the Hutus. Certainly not Northern Europeans. Certainly not Italians and Hispanics. Certainly not the Comanche, Sioux, and Apache. Certainly not the Japanese, Mongols, Chinese, and East Indians. Certainly not Arabs, Egyptians, Persians, and Israelites. Certainly not hundreds of other unique ethnocultural groups hidden under the contrived labels of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander.

Those without blood on their ancestral hands can throw the first racial stone.

Speaking of blood on their hands, it’s time to turn to Sicilian mobsters, as promised.

If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her to marry one. If I had a business, I wouldn’t want to hire one. Nor would I want to live next door to one. And if I were a prosecutor, I’d go after them with a vengeance, as Rudy Giuliani did, if for no other reason than they give other Italians a bad name.

It’s not just their criminality. It’s their culture of superstitions, vendettas, machoism, and crudity. Sure, both the culture and the Mafia came about because of Sicily being impoverished and conquered by so many different invaders over millennia, and because governments were so corrupt and incapable of protecting the population from predation. But in the end, so what? Knowing that history still doesn’t make me want to break bread with a Sicilian mobster, especially not at a New York Italian restaurant, where bullets might be the main course and I could end up in the trunk of a car in the long-term parking lot at Newark Airport.

Does that make me a racist?

If so, here is more evidence of my racism: I also don’t like white supremacists, communists, fascists, Antifa, religious zealots, partisan ideologues and dogmatists, and the naïve belligerents of both parties who squandered trillions of dollars in useless wars overseas for more than two decades instead of on the revitalization of America’s urban and rural slums.

In addition, I don’t like the Cuomo brothers, Nancy Pelosi, Sean Hannity, Don Lemon, Dick Cheney, and the guy who heads up Facebook. The same with gangbangers and celebrities whose faces are covered with tattoos, or the fellow Arizonan who wore animal skin and Viking horns at the Capitol riot.

No doubt, they don’t like me or my kind, either.

That doesn’t mean that I want to take their rights away, or treat them uncivilly, or cancel them, or subject their kids to reeducation, or exclude them from our Democratic, pluralistic, classical liberal society. Nor does it mean that I think they are genetically inferior. It just means that I don’t like their beliefs and behavior, including their propensity to want to infringe on other people’s rights, or to take other people’s stuff, or to implement half-baked notions for remedying complex social and economic problems, or to see people in terms of race instead of individuals. My dislike has nothing to do with race.

Maybe someday I’ll be as enlightened and open-minded as those who see themselves as woke and who embrace critical race theory. You know, the people who focus on someone’s race and pigmentation instead of the person’s individuality.

From a Mobster to a Privileged White Racist

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Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

In the name of wokeness, one ugly slur has been replaced by another.

Warning:  The following is a representative sample of past and present racial/ethnic slurs and stereotypes. If you grit your teeth and bear with it, you’ll see why they’re repeated here.

  • Poles were known as dumb Polacks.
  • The Irish were known as mics and drunkards.
  • Jews were known as kikes and greedy money-changers.
  • Mexicans were known as lazy sombrero-wearing spics.
  • Southerners were known as hillbillies and rednecks.
  • Native Americans were known as redskins.
  • Arabs were known as camel jocks.
  • The Chinese were known as chinks.
  • East Indians were known as dots.
  • African Americans were known by the “N-word” and other slurs.

Then there is my own race/ethnicity. Italians were known throughout much of the 20th century as dagos, wops, greasers, guineas, and mobsters. In fact, the Italian section of St. Louis, which was the home of my parents and grandparents, was known as Dago Hill when I was a kid. It wasn’t just Southern white supremacists who were prejudiced against Italians but also Yankee bluebloods.

Offensive, eh?

Well, here is an offensive slur and stereotype in vogue today: Whites are racist, privileged, and fragile.

The people who say this see themselves as woke, open-minded, enlightened, educated, and anti-racist. Actually, they are the opposite.

They’re also slow on the uptake, especially those who have just recently awakened to the fact that blacks as a group (but not necessarily as individuals) have faced horrendous discrimination, prejudice, and institutional barriers.

It’s better to be awake than asleep, but it’s not better to believe that the way to remedy past prejudices and stereotypes about blacks is to parrot new prejudices and stereotypes about whites. That’s exactly what critical race theory does. 

Such black thinkers as Ibram Kendi and Nehisi Coates believe that every negative outcome of African Americans can be traced back to slavery and white racism.  Even if one agrees with them, how does it change anything to pin racism on every white person alive today, especially given that “white” is so ill-defined and contrived, as will be discussed later?

And even if the thinkers are right that racism is insidious, entrenched, and implicit in white culture, white political and economic power, white liberal democracy, and white capitalism, how do they propose uprooting the racism and overturning the existing order without creating new forms of racism and worse problems? In view of their own racism and affection for coercion, it doesn’t look promising.    

In any event, too much of what passes for wokeness focuses on abstractions, symbolism, tokenism, pieties, and virtue signaling instead of focusing on real solutions to real problems in so-called disadvantaged communities.  (I’ll spare you the details of my efforts in this regard over my career.)

One example of symbolism over substance is TV commercials.

It’s a positive development that TV advertising (and shows) no longer exclude blacks or typecast them negatively. Likewise, it’s a positive change that advertising no longer features whites almost exclusively, as it did in the “Leave It to Beaver” era when there was an idealized portrayal of whites, a portrayal that was a different world from the world of my working-class Italian family and the world of other ethnic minorities.

But now the pendulum has swung so far the other way that it seems that 90% of commercials portray an idealized version of the 13% of the population that is black, as well as making sure that every other racial group and sexual orientation and gender choice gets a cameo appearance. 

In this utopia, everyone is attractive, articulate, educated, fit, hip, successful, multicultural, multiracial, and inter-married—a utopia where all races live together in peace and harmony and drive to a mountaintop together in a Subaru, a car that is love, sold by a company that supports the right causes and gives back to the community, although it is a company headquartered in non-diverse Japan and is a company that made fighter planes in World War II to wreak terror on China, the Philippines, Pearl Harbor, and elsewhere.

In a similar vein, the East Indian CEO of Hero Motor Company, the maker of motorcycles, was interviewed during the recent Hero golf tournament in the Bahamas. Instead of speaking about the product, he spoke about diversity and inclusion. This is from the head of a company with its headquarters in India, a nation known for its caste system, and a nation with a popular prime minister who is openly biased in favor of the Hindu majority and against the Muslim minority.

It’s the same with aristocratic CEOs of gigantic American companies who parrot ritualistic statements about diversity and inclusion while doing business in China, where the Han Chinese dominate in government and industry over ethnic minorities.

Companies have gone from engaging in advertising spin about their products to advertising spin about their social goodness.  It’s what their idealistic customers demand. Of course, if advertisers don’t have the right mix of diversity in their commercials, they’ll hear from grievance groups and be pilloried by Twitter mobs. Thus it’s safer to have every group covered in just about every commercial than to try to match the frequency of a group’s appearance in commercials with their representation in the U.S. population.

Whatever the motivation of advertisers, it seems so contrived, unoriginal, obligatory, and condescending. 

I would have found it strange as a teen if Italians, who comprise about 5% of the population, had been in 90% of commercials and had spoken the King’s English, dressed in the latest couture, partied at hip places, driven to a mountaintop in a Subaru, and were lawyers, doctors, executives, and other professionals.

I would have wondered why my family and other Italians were such failures by comparison—why my fraternal grandpa was a barkeep and former coal miner, why my maternal grandpa was a waiter who never owned a car, why my dad was a non-union tile setter who didn’t own a suit, why my mom was a clerk, why our family car was a decrepit Dodge with the floorboards rusted out, and why I worked as the only non-black on an otherwise all-black janitorial and kitchen crew at an exclusive country club, where membership was denied to Italians, Jews, and blacks; where the Anglo-Saxon-Protestant members saw me as a person of color; and where my coworkers put me at the bottom of the employee pecking order and gave me the worst jobs, such as cleaning the filthy employee restroom in the grungy basement.

As with so much of what passes today for enlightenment, open-mindedness and diversity and inclusion, the disproportionate appearance of blacks in commercials will do little if anything to raise the abysmal grades and test scores of African-American students, or to reduce the horrendous murder rates in inner-cities, or to reduce the high incidence of African-American kids raised without a father in the household, or to transform African-American slums from crime-ridden drug bazaars to safe, clean and prosperous communities.      

Calling whites privileged and racist also won’t change anything. Nor will the widespread trope that all whites are the same in privilege, advantages, political power, income, skin shade, heritage, values, beliefs, attitudes, and DNA. The fact is that whites are so diverse that it would be very difficult if not impossible to define “white person” or to recite the hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups that are lumped together in the official “white” category as if they are homogenous and all of them are Anglo-Saxons from Northern Europe.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes to mind. She sees herself as a “person of color,” but her features, hair color, and skin shade are similar to those of my relatives. Curiously, the relatives are categorized as white but she is not. Why is that?

Or take all of the Americans whose ancestral roots go back to the huge swath of geography that extends from the southern side of the Pyrenees and Alps to the Sahara desert, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. How did they become white?  And how did they climb to the middle class and higher?

Many had to climb a long way from deep disadvantages and even oppression, albeit not as far as descendants of slaves have had to climb. So how did they do it?

First, they didn’t rely on the paternalism of the Anglo-Saxon-Protestant establishment, or on offices of diversity and inclusion, or on tokenism, or on race hustlers, or on critical race theory. For example, Amedeo Giannini, the son of Italian immigrants, founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in 1904 without the aid of the East Coast banking establishment. The bank would become the Bank of America.

Second, they survived the travesties of progressivism. One travesty, which today’s progressives like to forget, was the eugenics movement, which lasted about 50 years in the 20th century.  The movement’s mission was to keep undesirables from procreating. Eugenicists lobbied for the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, to stop the emigration of “inferior stock” from eastern and southern Europe and to protect the “old stock” of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic Americans.

It’s telling that today’s wokes cite the Chinese Exclusion Act as an example of past discrimination but say nothing about the Immigration Act of 1924. Citing the latter act would be an admission that ethnic minorities categorized as white have also faced discrimination.

Italians and other ethnic minorities survived another travesty of progressivism: the welfare state that blossomed in the 1960s, or more specifically, the features of the welfare state that incentivized poor women to raise their children without their father in the household. It bypassed most of the ethnic minorities because they were well on their way to the middle class at the time. Unfortunately, blacks didn’t escape the ill effects. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Labor Department sociologist and future U.S. Senator had warned at the advent of the programs, the result would be disastrous for black families.

It’s telling that today’s progressives are largely silent about this major cause of socio-economic problems within the black community.   

Another tragedy of progressivism was its animus for Catholic schools and other private schools. My poor grandparents could somehow afford to send my parents to Catholic secondary and primary schools, just as my parents of very modest means were able to do the same for me. It helped back then that more Catholics had the vocation to be nuns and priests, which lowered the cost of running parochial schools. It also helped that taxes were so much lower. In any event, parents had an alternative to the mediocre public schools in their hood.

Today, progressives oppose school choice and vouchers, although such policies enable blacks and other poor people to escape schools in their hood that are worse than mediocre.   

But don’t listen to me. I’m a racist. As proof, authors and consultants specializing in critical race theory say that any white guy who denies he is a racist is a racist, especially if he dares to disagree with some of the tenets of CRT.