“Racial disparities persist despite Obama election” shouts an Associated Press headline.
I’m sure many people had high hopes that the presence of a black man (biracial, to be precise) in the White House would mean the end of the belief that racism is an ever-burning fire in America. Sorry to dash your hopes. As I’ve written before, it’s human nature to blame others for our failures. (But we tend to credit ourselves for success. Convenient, eh?)
Even if all branches of federal, state, and local governments were headed by black people, we’d be reading headlines like this:
“Racial disparities persist despite blacks running the country”
As expected, people quoted in the article erroneously attribute racial disparities to racism, that phantom-like, elusive practice no one can define. For some people, a certain look or fairly innocuous remarks can be perceived as racism. In 2008, you’ll rarely hear an example of actual racist behavior toward blacks: forcing them to sit at the rear of public conveyances, preventing them from voting, assigning them to separate schools based on race, etc.
We’re left with a wishy-washy definition for what passes as racism in 2008: the cause of any kind of negative difference that exists between blacks and everyone else.
A scenario: a black child who grows up without a father, and his mother works or exists on welfare. The child lives in an unstable home where he’s never taught the value of education, good morals, right conduct…he grows up influenced by the wrong element and likely will end up in the criminal justice system. Can we blame his life’s outcome on racist white people or bad parenting and bad values?
As the article notes, whites are more likely to hold college degrees and less likely than blacks to end up in prison. Black males kill one another at exorbitant rates. Black women kill their babies at three times the rate of white women. Almost three-quarters of black babies are born outside wedlock. We’re to believe that “racism” is responsible for these disparities?
Search for racism under any rock, and you’re sure to find something or someone to blame for your underachievement.
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