Is Racism a Fact or a Faith?

Let’s talk about racism. Well, it’s the day after Christmas, and time to take up weighty subjects.

Asks Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt:

A recent CNN poll tells us that 84% of blacks and 66% of whites think racism is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem in American life. Is this true?

Since it’s Steele asking the question, you know what the answer is going to be.

[W]e must acknowledge one of the most profound achievements in recent human history: the death of white supremacy. Here was an event far more world-altering than the collapse of communism, and yet, out of a truly extraordinary historical blindness, it has gone utterly unnoticed.
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It was defeated by revolutions in the last half of the 20th century that spanned the globe from India to Algeria to the United States. It was defeated by the people who had suffered it. And even if it survives in some quarters as an idea, as a speculation, it now stigmatizes anyone associated with it to the point of ruin.

That is why when a comedian like Michael Richards uses the N-word in a comedy routine, he gets handed his guts for garters. Obviously, racism still exists, but racists have a pretty hard time of it these days. That is, of course, white racists. Racism florishes in non-white lands, including most particularly the lands of the House of Submission.

So the question is whether racism is a fact or a faith.

The great mistake Americans made after the civil rights victories of the '60s was to allow race to become a government-approved means to power. Here was the incentive to make racism into a faith. And its subsequent life as a faith has destroyed our ability to know the reality of racism in America. Today we live in a terrible ignorance that will no doubt last until we take race out of every aspect of public life -- until we learn, as we did with religion, to separate it from the state.

Now that’s an interesting concept, the separation of race and state. And it is not some vague constitutional penumbra, but actually written into the constitution as an Amendment. Actually, two Amendments. And then it was written into law in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

There is none so blind as he who will not see.