To listen to the unhinged bloviation of elite academia regarding racism in America is to personify George Orwell’s axiom: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them.”

Today’s political discourse is saturated by claims that America is a “systemically racist” country. Allegedly, this virulent racism pervades every major American institution — academia, the justice system, government, business, education, etc.

Where is the proof?

Regarding the justice system, the “anti-racist” progressive Left looks at the disproportionate rates of black men incarcerated as evidence of systemic racism, as if crimes are committed in direct proportion to the racial makeup of society. This completely ignores differences in the behaviors that lead to incarceration.

Black people make up 13% of the population, yet, according to Justice Department statistics, in 2018 (the latest year available), blacks committed 53% of murders/non-negligent homicides, 54% of robberies, and 34% of aggravated assaults. In 2016, blacks committed 29% of all rapes. And keep in mind, the majority of the victims in these cases are black.

By contrast, Asians make up 5.6% of the U.S. population but are arrested for just 1.3% of murders, 1.4% of robberies, and 2.1% of armed robberies.

Is this, therefore, proof of a pro-Asian bias in law enforcement, where Asians are actually committing more crimes, but police are overlooking them because they are Asian? Or is it more likely that, due to cultural differences, Asians commit far fewer crimes both overall and as a percentage of the population?

What role do individual decisions play in incarceration rates? There is a direct correlation between having a father in the home and crime rates, and there is a greater than 70% unwed-pregnancy rate in the black community.

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, one of the nation’s foremost legal minds, exposes the fallacy of claiming systemic racism. “Enforcement authorities, defense counsel, and the court frequently bend over backwards to plead cases out to softer versions of the criminal conduct’s harsh reality,” he writes. “They do so precisely to rationalize the avoidance or reduction of jail time.”

If these arrests are racially driven, where are the mountains of motions by defense lawyers arguing a racial motivation in their clients’ arrests? Where are the complaints against racist judges?

The self-flagellating claims of pervasive racism in academia are even more ludicrous. After all, American universities are overwhelmingly run by progressive administrators, with courses overwhelmingly taught by leftist professors.

If institutional racism is so deeply embedded in the university system, which is overwhelmingly dominated by “anti-racist” progressives, who is to blame for the systemic racism?

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald asks the same relevant question we posed above: namely, where is the proof? If such academic racism exists, she asks, “Which faculty members do not treat black students fairly? If that unjust treatment is so obvious, why weren’t those professors already removed?” How have we tolerated an admissions process that apparently lets in thousands of student bigots?“

If racism, as Middlebury College President Laurie Patton claims, "happens in our residence halls and in our classrooms, at the tables of our dining halls and in our locker rooms, on our sidewalks, within the offices where we work, and in our town,” why have these woke administrators and professors allowed it to fester and take root?

Of course, every sane person knows these ridiculous declarations are nothing more than pseudo-pious virtue signaling.

Those rare brave souls — like Penn Law Professor Amy Wax — who dare depart from leftist orthodoxy and speak truth are immediately forced to recant, or they are personally and professionally destroyed.

The truth is that there is a racial bias in academia … in favor of minorities. Black students have much lower thresholds for entrance into college than white or Asian students. Universities are appointing vice presidents and chancellors of diversity to make sure no minority ever has their tender little feelings hurt, intentionally or unintentionally. The mere hint of an allusion to a possibility of racism sends the entire university administration structure into a panic, pleading forgiveness, launching witch hunts to find offenders, and prostrating themselves before the anti-racist woke mob and begging for mercy.

This leads to such insanity as UC-Davis starting an “anti-racist reading group” for faculty and students in order to combat the “structural racism that pervades” the field of geology. You read that right — geology, the study of rocks.

The journal Nature declared the mission of science should be to “amplify marginalized voices,” and the American Mathematical Society declared “equity, diversity, and inclusion” as a core component of its mission, where mathematicians have an “obligation” to “help create fundamental change.”

This is all utter and complete lunacy.

To be sure, American universities are indeed hotbeds of virulent bigotry — just not in the way they claim. They are openly hostile of and contemptuous toward conservative political thought and Judeo-Christian beliefs (though quite tolerant of Islamic beliefs). Conservative, Christian students are routinely mocked, harassed, denied free speech, persecuted, and even physically assaulted.

The saddest part of all of this is that we are raising generations of minority children who are taught to be victims, who are taught that the world hates them and actively seeks to oppress them, and that they can never achieve their goals because of it.

This destroys hope, ambition, and a sense of personal responsibility. It stokes despair, hatred, and rage. Eventually, cities burn.

What a reprehensible and destructive thing to do to a young mind, all in the name of a phony narrative of “systemic racism.”