Race Relations – Better than You Think

Race Relations – Better than You Think

– By Howard Sierer –

From what we read in much of the media, “white privilege” has perpetuated “systemic racism.” And try as they might, whites are inescapably burdened with “unconscious bias.”

This downbeat assessment of today’s society is intended to serve the left’s political agenda, electing more progressives to office to combat an imagined epidemic of white nationalists.

As proof, they tell us that racists, sexists, and xenophobes, animated by hatred and bigotry, put Trump in the White House. That flies in the face of common sense and the facts although it’s been reported so often that, like all propaganda, it’s accepted by many citizens.

Refuting this claim, the New York Times in a rare moment of candor reported in 2017 that “It’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump. He flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side. The voter file data makes it impossible to avoid this conclusion.”

Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London and a fellow at New York’s Manhattan Institute, asks in a recent report, “What if the media and the national conversation isn’t exposing racism so much as creating it, or at least, creating the impression that it’s far more prevalent than we thought?”

Kaufmann documents the fact that racial attitudes have shown dramatically increasing tolerance for over 50 years while liberal politicians, professional race hustlers and leftist media organs like the New York Times have insisted race relations are getting worse.

According to Kaufmann, “At a time when measures of racist attitudes and behavior have never been more positive, pessimism about racism and race relations has increased in America.” Terms like “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” appear regularly in leftist media, while white racist views have become increasingly relegated to obscurity and rarely arise when referring to black co-workers, classmates, or neighbors.

As an example of growing tolerance, attitudes toward interracial marriage – once a hot button issue in much of the country – are significantly improved for the better. Kaufmann notes, “Approval of black-white intermarriage rose among whites from around 4% in 1958 to 45% in 1995 and 84% in 2013. In 2017, fewer than 10% of whites in a major Pew survey said that interracial marriage was a ‘bad thing,’” and the “actual share of intermarried newlyweds rose from 3% in 1967 to 17% in 2015.”

Intermarriages involving Asians, Hispanics and Jews also have all risen sharply over the decades. Nonetheless, the finger-pointing progressive media want to lecture the rest of us on how to be “antiracist.”

Kaufmann reminds readers that, “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.” He cites the same statistics I included last month in my column on the disaster the radical left inflicted on blacks by defunding police in a number of major cities.

Per the Washington Post, about a thousand civilians are killed by police each year, most of whom are armed and dangerous. Sadly, some are unarmed: 60 unarmed civilians were killed by police in 2020, a disproportionately high, 18 of whom were black.

Statistically rare incidents like the George Floyd killing are amplified by the liberal media and echoed on social media, giving the impression that isolated and infrequent events “happen all the time.” While such tragedies have fallen over time for all races, as a nation we shouldn’t be satisfied until they disappear completely.

Are there still white racists? Certainly. But their numbers have been diminishing steadily for decades. Trying to inflate both their numbers and their influence – and particularly equating them to conservatives and Republicans in general – is part and parcel of leftist political posturing.

Over a hundred years ago, African-American educator and presidential adviser Booker T. Washington made an observation that applies to today’s liberal politicians and media just as well as it did to his contemporaries:

“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well because as long as the disease holds out, they have not only an easy means of making a living but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”

I agree with Eric Kaufmann that both the existence and effects of racism are greatly exaggerated allowing those with vested interests to “make themselves prominent before the public,” finding racism at every turn.

I cheer Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind America. Each of us should examine our hearts and behaviors and ask ourselves what we can do to help turn his vision into a reality.

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