Originally published 09/01/20 on Rogue Review.

Racism is rampant

We can’t be too careful nowadays – cancel culture lurks on every corner of social media, waiting with bated breath for the slightest misstep about gender, supporting the police, or the biggest gotcha of all – being a racist.

So, as a service to my fellow countrymen and countrywomen, I’ve put together a little survey below to help you sniff out any hint of latent racism that you might have because, as analogized by Rev Nancy Bacon, systemic racism is like Christianity; it’s pervasive – “it’s in the air we breathe.”

Take the Quiz: Are you a racist?

Read each statement below. Give yourself one point if you agree. If you disagree, just move on to the next point.

Here we go…

1. The people who are currently protesting about injustice for the black race are exhibiting a kind of mimicry because the issues that they are protesting lack the gravity of the issues that were relevant back in the 1950s/60s. The current protesters are more about adolescent rebellion. Black Lives Matter has no authentic mission in this world

2. Minority students have every opportunity to flourish in American life. The biggest problem right now is that white Americans have lost their moral confidence and will not stand up for obvious, common sense things that black people need to be doing to improve their own lives

3. If black people want to get out of poverty, they should finish school, take any job, get married, save and invest, and give back to their neighborhoods

4. White liberals need blacks in order to have groups to redeem. White liberals exploit and use blacks by continually seeing them as victims

5. Many black people today have bought into black victimhood to gain attention from white people

6. The number one challenge in the black community today is the collapse of the black nuclear family unit

7. Instead of playing the victim, black people should take individual responsibility for becoming decent people – law-abiding and hardworking

8. “Defund the police” is simply a diversion from the real problems in the black community. The issue of “better policing in America” is a thousand miles away from what the black community really needs: better education and repairing the black nuclear family

9. Many black people try to make white people feel guilty so that the white people will doll out goodies to black people

10. “Kneeling” is just a symbolic gesture that means nothing. Conversations about these kinds of things are silly and stupid

Ok – how many points do you have on these ten statements?

The more points you have, the more racist you are. I scored a “10.”

Help me, Jesus!

Quiz Methodology

Except that…everyone one of these statements, except one, is a quote or a close paraphrase from an interview with Shelby Steele from July 7th, 2020.

Shelby Steele is a black professor, author, and fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He grew up in segregated schools in Chicago in the 1950s – he knows what a racist society looks like, and he knows that American society is no longer racist today.

The statement he did not make is the one about the steps for blacks to get out of poverty.

That statement was an ad by CURE (Center for Urban Renewal and Education, founded by the former black, female welfare queen, Star Parker) run on billboards in impoverished neighborhoods. As “common sense” as those steps may seem, social justice warriors stormed the Clear Channel offices (the ad company that put up the billboards) in Baltimore, MD, demanding that the billboards be taken down – and they were.

Fear, not my fellow Americans!

You are not a racist for believing – knowing – that to some extent, the problems in the black community are of their own making* and that the solution to those problems will not come from legislation to defund the police or to “equalize opportunity” for impoverished black people.

As Shelby Steele said above, black people have more opportunity now than ever before in America.

The solutions must come from within these communities, and the best thing that white people can do is have the courage “to speak the truth in love” to black people in difficult circumstances (that is Shelby Steele’s advice to white people, not my advice).

*I must make one caveat to my point that the problems in the black community are, to a certain degree, of their own making. Shelby Steele, in his book White Guilt – How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era – says that yes, white people are partially responsible for the problems of the black community, but not due to racism.

He says that the 1960’s Great Society welfare programs, instituted by mostly white politicians and white bureaucrats, stole black people’s freedom, granted by the Civil Rights And Voting Rights Acts, by putting them back into a dependency on the government instead of allowing them to face their newly won freedom and to develop the human capital necessary to thrive as free individuals. Additionally, Steele states that many black leaders played along with that game for their own power, prestige, and enrichment.

Final thought – how long have professional race-baiters been operating in the US? Come to find out, it’s been going on for well over a century. Check out this quote from 1911 from the famous black American leader Booker T. Washington:

“There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.” (1)

Amen! Preach it brothers Steele and Washington!