Where there is no bread, there is no Law. Where there is no Law, there is no bread.
— Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah
Racial identity politics has become the rage in the media, entertainment, and political worlds. You cannot read a mainstream publication, attend a sporting event, or browse a new educational curriculum without running a gauntlet of admonitions about America’s “systemic” racism and how it must be addressed, including through violence.
Millionaire athletes, anchors, non-profits, and corporate executives genuflect to groups like Black Lives Matter, an organization with openly radical, neo-Marxist aims. Yet amidst all this, very little attention has focused on what actually works for minorities who have faced harsh treatment in the past. By focusing largely on white guilt, suggests Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, movements like BLM embrace a form of “egghead racialism” that sees salvation as part of an effort to “strive to be less white,” as if their very pigmentation is a mark of inherent evil.
No doubt this agenda is working profitably for some, such as writers and administrators in the diversity “industry” and even some black fashion designers. But rhetorical genuflecting and quotas for board seats does little to improve the conditions on the ground for the vast majority of historically disadvantaged groups like African-Americans. As John McWhorter pointed out in the Atlantic, the idea that black progress relies largely on addressing white sinfulness seems an extreme form of “dehumanizing condescension” that robs Blacks, and other minorities, of any agency outside protest or destruction and does little to address the underlying causes of despair.
What works? A historical perspective