Culture & Society

Culture & Society

The United States was built and has thrived on the premise that all should have an equal opportunity to pursue one’s own vision of happiness through hard work and determination. Some damaging aspects of current American society, however, threaten to upend the importance of that principle. Pitting groups of Americans against one another for favored status, benefits, and blame, based not on deservedness but instead on immutable characteristics such as race, sex, sexual orientation, and the like, only imperils a historically exceptional American culture.

EXAMPLES

Identity politics: Identity politics is a practice by which the diversity within various groups of people who identify similarly in a particular way, such as female, black American, homosexual, etc., is disregarded. Instead, these individuals are categorized as all having a uniform political agenda to which officials in power—or who desire power—pander. The concept is demeaning, senseless, and pits American citizens against one another.

Critical Race Theory: Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic concept designed to study and discern the causes of racial disparities in society. Central to CRT are its conclusions that disparities among races in education, employment, wealth, and other areas, are caused by racial discrimination. Shorthand for these conclusions are terms that have reached the public lexicon such as “white privilege” and “structural/systemic racism.” For whatever its theoretical value, in practice CRT is dividing and embittering the American population. By injecting the phantom concept of widespread racial discrimination in 21st-century America, CRT is creating real-world problems among the American population where they otherwise did not exist.

Equality of Opportunity vs. Equity of Outcome: The American public is being misled. The public overwhelmingly supports equal treatment and opportunity. However, a new and unwise—albeit similar sounding—effort to advance “equity” is attempting to replace that concept. The idea of equity that is today being promoted by such institutions as government, business, and academia is the intentional discrimination, bias, or favoritism—often based on race or ethnicity—to achieve a desired outcome.

The Huffington Post last week had an article headlined, “Ocasio-Cortez Slams the ‘Racial Injustice’ of the Cannabis Business As White Men Profit,” reporting that the “New York congresswoman suggests ‘affirmative-action licensing’ to mitigate the ‘racial wealth gap’ in areas that paid the price of the war on drugs.” She’s offended by the fact that too many white men are making money on legalized pot, and suggests that maybe licenses should be distributed so as to favor nonwhites, to make up for the fact that so many of them were arrested in the past for dealing drugs illegally. I’m not happy …

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