It’s Not That Complicated | Center for Equal Opportunity

The struggle against the Left on racial matters — in which I include politically correct race-based decisionmaking, identity politics, and related and supporting ideologies — is part legal and part cultural.

The legal part is straightforward enough and is going tolerably well. The Center for Equal Opportunity opposes the use of racial preferences, which are now legally constrained to a degree but still far too common in education, employment, and contracting; and it opposes the use of the “disparate impact” approach in the enforcement of our civil-rights laws, which is likewise constrained but not nearly enough. I’m reasonably optimistic right now that we will continue to make progress — maybe even dramatic progress — at the federal level during this administration, both in the executive branch itself and in litigation, especially as the judiciary improves.

I have to add, though, that I was very pessimistic on Election Eve in 2016, and I expect to be nervous again this year before the first Tuesday in November. And there are a lot of states where the prospects are already much gloomier, including my own Virginia. The legal struggle very much hangs in the balance.

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The cultural part of the struggle is more complicated.

On the one hand, the general public overwhelming rejects the notion of racial preferences, reparations, and the like. Yet there is little willingness among academics and corporate leaders to take politically incorrect positions. They, and other Americans too, should be bolder in challenging the cancel culture.

The job of conservative think tanks and intellectuals is to provide and distribute intelligent pushback. That’s something else the Center for Equal Opportunity strives to do.

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By the way, on the subject of boldness, I’d like to share this excerpt from a recent column by Andy Kessler in the Wall Street Journal:

The president’s success comes from his ability to shrug off critics. My son went to college in the early days of the social justice power grab. He recalls heated discussions in which someone would interrupt him to say, “Sorry, but you don’t get a say—you have white privilege.” My son would shoot right back: “Yeah, I don’t believe in that,” and resume his argument. That’s what Mr. Trump does. Rather than cower at the criticism he faces from the mobs, he probably smirks and thinks to himself, “Yeah, I don’t believe in that” and tweets away.

That’s the only reaction that can withstand today’s far left, which has become increasingly self-righteous. The very word “woke” asserts a kind of rebornness—as if those on their side have awakened and become holier than thou. It’s religion on the cheap. The movement takes “diversity” to mean people who see the world exactly as they do, only with different surface characteristics: race, class and gender identity. There’s no room for diversity of expression, let alone diversity of thought. (I’ve confirmed this at Silicon Valley cocktail parties.)

Mr. Trump was elected as an antibody against this swampy disease. He’s the antidote to the snake bite of correctness. He’s a white (privileged?) blood cell fighting the coronavirus of the culture.

I have my doubts about our president, and on racial issues he sometimes is too politically correct and at other times too politically incorrect, but I do like his frequent willingness to challenge the Left.

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Let me elaborate here a bit more on the sorts of political correctness I’m talking about. It’s the notions of “white privilege” and “institutional racism” and “mass incarceration”; the mindset of diversity uber alles; the 1619 Project approach to American history; and the notion that those who reject the Left’s positions on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” are hopeless bigots.

Thus, for example, we are told that being opposed to racial preferences is now racist. Think about that. And saying you think the best qualified individual should be admitted to school, hired for a job, or awarded a contract — that’s racist, too. Amazing.

Now, as a I say, I think most of this is happily rejected by the general public. That’s the good news, even if our elites are afraid to say so. But, on the other hand, it’s scary the inroads being made in the K-12 system regarding U.S. history and sexual orientation/gender identity. And it will probably get worse before it gets better.

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Let me also note briefly here that none of the Left’s agenda would be even remotely attractive to anyone except for the presence and persistence of racial disparities — and really only those disparities involving African Americans. The way to address these disparities is not by pretending that the reason for their persistence is “white privilege” or “institutional racism” or anything like that. Rather it is by recognizing the real reason for the persistence of these disparities, which is cultural — particularly, as I noted in an email to you last month, the catastrophic out-of-wedlock birthrate among African Americans (69 percent nationally at last count, and even higher in many urban areas).

Indeed, pretending that main problem is privilege rather than culture (having children outside of marriage is fine, crime is cool or at least not the criminal’s fault, etc.) makes it less likely that the culture problem will be seriously addressed. The Left has no sense of perspective.

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There’s a powerful subtext in the Left’s approach to American history: “You should feel bad about yourself and your country because people of your color did bad things once upon a time to people of another color.” The idea is to intimidate and to shut people up, the better to advance the Left’s agenda. But this backward-looking message is not good for race relations, being all about blame, envy, and resentment, about feeding guilt and refusing to forgive.

Nor is a backward-looking focus a helpful one for young African Americans in particular. The following analogy might be apt. Suppose that an ante bellum Southerner criticized Yankees for having bad manners. He might well have been right. But, in hindsight, we would all agree that, bad manners or not, the Yankees were right about slavery, and to focus on bad manners at a time when that abhorrent institution was alive and well showed, to put it charitably, a lack of perspective.

Or, to give a funnier example, recall the scene in the movie version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where the Nazi playwright is bemoaning the fact that Churchill is more fondly remembered than Hitler, notwithstanding the fact that Hitler was a better dresser, a better dancer, and a better joke-teller. Well, maybe, but still ….

In 2020, for the Left to be focused on renaming buildings and removing statues — when 69 percent of African Americans are being born out of wedlock, and that is the real obstacle to black progress — shows a similar lack of perspective. To live well and prosper, the focus must be on seizing opportunities in the present and preparing for the future, not obsessing over wrongs in the past.

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So the key to designing a pathway forward on race relations is, duh, to focus on the future and not the past. That’s true in what the laws should say and how they should be applied, and it’s true for broader cultural and policy — and simply personal — considerations as well.

Personal analogies can be misleading in public policy, but there is one useful one here: It’s not a good idea to focus on the misfortunes of your past and what might have been; it’s better to focus on what you need to do going forward.

It’s just not that complicated. Can any sane person really believe that race relations will be improved by starting a system of reparations and further institutionalizing PC racial preferences? No: What’s needed is to fight racism of both the PC and old-fashioned kind.

Again, it’s not that complicated: Treat people as individuals. Don’t generalize about them because of their skin color or what country their ancestors came from.

It may be true that, when you meet an African American young male, he is more likely to have recently committed a crime than an Asian American older woman you meet. It may be more likely that the non-Hispanic white is more likely, again as a statistical matter, to have led a life of ease and privilege than a Hispanic you meet. But there are so many exceptions, and it is so unfair, that it’s wrong to generalize. Again, treat people as individuals.

It’s not that complicated. There’s a time for subtlety and nuance and balancing tests and considering the totality of circumstances — but there’s also a time for bright lines and simplicity and clarity. And race relations is in the latter category:

TREAT PEOPLE AS INDIVIDUALS — DON’T TREAT PEOPLE DIFFERENTLY BECAUSE OF THEIR COLOR.

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