The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Is Racism Moral Now?
Historian Victor Davis Hanson always has insights worth pondering, and his recent article on racism is no different.
Racism is the deductive bias against, and often hatred of, an entire racial group. It is often birthed by dislike of particular individuals of a given group that supposedly justifies, by extension, disliking or indeed hating all of them. The popular reaction against this widespread toxic pathology shown African Americans birthed the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, the resistance to Jim Crow, and the modern Civil Rights movement.
But now there grows a strange new ahistorical “antiracism” racism.
One variety encourages holistic hatred, blaming all of one’s own unhappiness, indeed all of the cosmic injustice in the manmade and natural world — the very air, water, and earth — on a white racial collective.
There are plenty of examples of this racism, Hanson says, all the way from journalists and college professors to the former president of the United States, Barack Obama. But the picture is still the same:
The new antiracism racism, whatever its original intentions, unfortunately exhibits the historical telltale signs of its noxious genre: an a priori negative stereotyping of all whites that can then be applied to individuals deemed undeserving because they are white.
This sort of racist division has far-reaching consequences for our culture. And, from a historian’s perspective, there are many yet to come. “America is not a sinful racist mess,” Hanson concludes, “but a great experiment as the only multiracial, self-reflecting, and self-critical democracy in history that did not — yet — descend into tribal chaos and violence.”