As I wrote recently, facts, as opposed to the lunatic conspiracy theories of BLM, show that America is one of the best places in the world to be brown. Contrary to the media-left narrative, seven of the wealthiest eight ethnic groups in the US today are non-white.
“White privilege” is a racist myth. The only “systemic racism” in America today is the unshakeable bias against whites that rules supreme in academia, the media and much of the left side of politics.
However, the core claim of this theory – that minorities are treated worse by “systems” than are similar or equivalent whites – often simply collapses when we look at the impact on group performance of important variables other than race.
On pretty much every metric commonly cited as “proof” of “systemic racism”, disparities are always explained by anything else.
For example, the widely cited income gap between American blacks and whites (the average African-American income is $43,862) largely vanishes given simple adjustments for variables such as aptitude, test scores, median age (the most common age for an African American is 27, vs 58 for whites), region of residence and years of education. Similarly, gaps in rates of police shooting and even police encounter by race close almost completely given a single adjustment for the black rate of victim-reported violent crime, which is unfortunately 2.4 higher than the white rate.
If not racism, then what?
I suspect that even the advantages of being born rich pale in comparison to the (quite empirically measurable) effects of making good logical choices in life.
None of these logical choices are out of the reach of almost anyone in America (or anywhere else in the West) today. Finishing high school, waiting until marriage to have children, avoiding crime… these are all easily available choices, no matter what your race. Making the same bad choices will have much the same result, even if you’re white.
The poverty rate was nearly 25 per cent for white children born into single-mother families, but only seven per cent for black children born into two-parent families. This is a 314 per cent advantage in favor of blacks – and there is evidence to suggest that other individual behaviors, such as studying hard and remaining physically fit and attractive, similarly predict success. There turns out to be a great deal of truth to the old and boring adage, beloved of high-school men’s coaches, priests and rabbis, that one need only do four things in life to avoid poverty: graduate high school, take any job and work, never be convicted of a felony and avoid having children until married.
The great, systemic threat in America today is not largely non-existent “racism”, but the ceaseless promotion of obvious lies by race-baiters whose careers and income are entirely dependent on maintaining the fiction. The result is that a great many people, most especially on the political left, hold an unshakeable worldview that is diametrically opposite to the facts.
A recent report by the heterodox but respected Skeptic Research Center found that 31 per cent of individuals who identify politically as very liberal believe that “about 1,000” unarmed black men were killed by police just during 2019, and another 14 per cent believe that “about 10,000” such men were killed. Conservatives did a bit better, but, among ordinary mainstream liberals, the equivalent figures were 27 per cent and almost seven per cent.
To put these astonishing (if hypothetical) figures in context, the total number of specifically unarmed, specifically black citizens killed by American police during the year in question was 13.
Largely thanks to what is indistinguishable from a deliberate campaign of misinformation by the legacy media, Americans firmly hold a great many factually wrong beliefs about race in America. For instance, Americans believe that about 30 per cent of the population is Jewish – 15 times the real figure. Similarly, they believe about 25 per cent of Americans are homosexual, while the true figure is 3.8 per cent.
One of the great bugaboos of the contemporary left is “representation”: the claim that minorities are under-represented in mainstream media. This is a blatant lie. The truth is that minorities are wildly over-represented. Consider the 2022 Super Bowl advertising: 50 per cent of actors were white, while the US population is 60 per cent white. But if whites were under-represented, Hispanics really got stiffed: two per cent of commercial actors were Hispanic, while 18 per cent of the population is.
Meanwhile, 40 per cent of actors were black, compared to the 13 per cent black population.
These are far from harmless lies.
When our fellow citizens riot and burn whole cities, or left and right fight viciously in the streets, the passions driving this regrettable violence are literally more likely to stem from fiction and fantasy than fact.
Commentary
BLM and its fellow travellers are quite literally the most dangerous misinformation in America right now.
So, why aren’t they being targeted by the gatekeepers of “dangerous misinformation”?
