Is America Really Racist?

 

Is America Really Racist?

 I am not a racist or white supremacist.  Nor, from observations during my long life, are most Americans at this point in time.  This nonsense being espoused by currently popular identity politics, intersectionality and critical race theory, that the majority of white Americans are “systemically racist”, is simply not true, and the product of an insidious bigotry inherent in these distorted views.  Combined with “cancel culture” and “wokeness”, this sort of thinking is destroying America by attacking our constitution, founding principles, traditions and history.

 It is a tragedy of our history that black Africans were brought to America against their will, beginning in the 17^th century, enslaved, and held in bondage as property for nearly 200 years.  A civil war, costing over 600,000 white American lives was fought in the mid nineteenth century, to begin freeing these black Americans.  Ensuing civil rights and legislative actions over the next 160+ years have ensured integration and enfranchisement of these black Americans, into our society. As of 2019, black Americans comprise 13% of our population.

 Obviously, there was residual resentment and bigotry against people of a different race and skin color at first, particularly since they had been held to be inferior in the past, and many were poor, uneducated and socially restricted.  These racial mores have changed with time and with advances in civil rights legislation to the point of acceptance of all races as Americans with equal rights.  In this day and age, most Americans truly believe Martin Luther King’s quote “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” 

 There are still pockets of racism and bigotry, just as there were residual pockets of “no Irish, (or Polish, or Italian), need apply” in the nineteenth century.  But racism and bigotry is diminishing with time, education and public awareness. We need to eliminate the pockets of bigotry that are still with us, but these are nowhere near the “systemic racism” posited by our alt-left Biden rulers.  Black Americans are ubiquitous in our entertainment, advertising and across all aspects of our lives.  Intermarriages are “coloring” our population, and lily-white blue-eyed blondes as symbols of beauty are being replaced by darker-skinned, sloe-eyed beauties.  

 Tragic, but anecdotal individual incidents occur, like George Floyd’s death, where a black American is killed by a white policeman, and our leftist inspired American world goes crazy.  This one incident, and a very few others like it, have been inflamed by irresponsible politicians and media into a virtual race war.  Cities are burned.  Police are reviled and “defunded”, because of these singular and anecdotal examples of “police brutality” and “racism”.  In the meantime, there is a near pandemic in our cities of black-on-black killing, including children, every week, without so much as a murmur from the same hypocritical politicians and media.

 We are all Americans with equal rights and responsibilities.  We should not be placed into identity politics “buckets” for special privileges or punishments.  We should remember our past, good and bad, and learn from it, not attempt to erase it, or rewrite it.  Statues and monuments are mementos of our heritage.  Why are we destroying them?  We should be learning lessons from them.  We should accept every American citizen, whether black, Asian, Muslim, white European, native born or naturalized, as having equal rights.  As MLK said, its “content of character” that counts.

Ray Gruszecki

April 22, 2021