Time and time again, especially in these politically volatile and uncertain years, this writer has found himself exhausted by the trite and dishonest claims of no racism ever having existed here in America while, at the same time, being deafened by utterances and blinded by behaviour couched in unadulterated racism.
When, on the other hand, attempts were made at being subtle about their racist beliefs, the proponents of such views, to equate their sense of white victimization with that experienced by people of colour, have often gone a step further by using historical facts, outside of their proper contexts, to try and make their point. They love to quote, for example, the following words which were uttered by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., which he had used to affirm the reality of racial bigotry against Blacks in America, which he had used to protest its long history of unjust and unequal outcomes, and which he had used to express his hope for change for Blacks amidst the animosity of white society:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
When such people in Mr. Trump’s MAGA world choose not to take a path of blatant racism, they make loud pleas for the establishment of “race neutral laws.” This was not just out of an attitude exhibited by white protestors in the streets, who were joined by some misguided people of colour, but coming from that which has been enshrined, systemically, within the very fabric of American society. The philosophy behind the so-called “race neutral laws” is the white power structure’s way of protecting the ill-gotten gains of its progeny, of sanitizing the history of their barbarity, of shielding them from the effects of their rightly deserved guilt, while, at the same time, in one fell swoop, berating, admonishing and penalizing their victims for having the temerity to protest against their racism and for asking for redress by declaring that their complaints were and continue to be tantamount to racism against whites, and equal to the racism of whites exhibited against Blacks.
“Race neutral laws” comprise the white power structure’s attempt, through disingenuous jurisprudential sophistry or alchemy, with the solemn backing of its religious establishment, not only to recast the grievances of such people of colour as crimes against whites — which resulted in their psychological, their physical, their cultural, their political, and their economic ostracism and lynchings — but also to, blatantly and condescendingly, ignore, minimize, trivialize and utilize such complaints as a basis of blame against those very people of colour — the victims — for their plight. Such laws have been engrafted into the real world in which we live from a strange, from an illogical and from a grossly immoral alternate universe.
If such a reasoning is to be believed — it was, therefore, the Africans who put themselves in chains; it was the Africans who sold themselves to merchant ships; it was the Africans who piloted those ships across The Middle Passage; it was the Africans who sold themselves on the auction blocks in North America and in the Caribbean to whites; it was the Africans who fashioned and oversaw their own oppression and brutality in the plantation system; it was the Africans who had enshrined themselves as slaves in the U.S. Constitution; it was the Africans who denied themselves of the rights and of the sanctity of marriage — content to be bred as cattle; it was the African women who raped white men which resulted in “half breeds”; it was the Africans who organized and operated the infamous slave patrols; it was the Africans who were the cause of the Civil War in America; it was the Africans who had set themselves free without anything to live on; it was the Africans who lynched themselves in the North as well as in the South; and it was the Africans who established and who enforced the Jim Crow laws. In other words, it was the Africans who had foisted themselves upon white society, against the will of the citizenry of white society.
If such a reasoning is to be believed — then the following facts, as outlined by Professor Samuel L. Myers and Professor Inhyuk “Steve” Ha, in their Social Policy & Policy Analysis Abstract, titled, Race Neutrality: Rationalizing Remedies to Racial Inequality, which was published in 2018 out of the University of Minnesota, must, again, be laid squarely at the feet of African Americans:
“There are wide racial disparities in virtually every sphere of economic life. African American workers earn less than whites. They are more likely to be denied loans than whites. Minority-owned businesses are less likely to win lucrative bids on state and federal contracts than are white male owned businesses. Black children are more likely than whites to be reported to child protective services for neglect or abuse. There are even huge disparities in downing rates between blacks and whites.”
The proponents of “race neutral laws” assert, in essence, that they are intended to stop the unequal footrace of racism from continuing by allowing whites to keep their medals and their garlands without ever really addressing the usage of the prohibited performance enhancing drugs of insatiable greed, of unbridled ambition, and of cultural genocide which made the awarding of such trophies possible, and by failing to address the weighty ball and chain of social, political and economic handicaps on to which Blacks have been shackled for so long. “Race neutral laws” are bandied about as the sage outcomes of the cogitations of the white intelligentsia as to how people of colour ought to be treated, without seriously addressing the underlying epidemiology of the disease of white racism in America — which has resulted in confused diagnoses, in faulty prognoses and in vapid and ineffective prescriptions. They are as commercial labels stating low sodium content in bottles full of salt. Such labels would mean nothing and would continue to mean nothing without addressing the contents in such bottles.
“Race neutral laws”, as espoused by the United States Supreme Court, and as enthusiastically as they have been embraced by white society, have called for the discontinuation of the usage of any legal or political scalpels, with a hint of the taint of race on their blades, for societal redress for wrongs done against people of colour, as was the case with affirmative action before it was repealed, arguing that they are not only illegal but no longer necessary, only to leave the metastasizing malignant tumour firmly in place.
In the world of medicine, elements of certain infectious diseases have often been incorporated into the development of vaccines to fight those very diseases. Such biological poisons were not ignored, but they were wisely incorporated into solving the problems which those diseases had created. The Supreme Court, it appears, against such a backdrop of scientific pragmatism, has taken an infantile, pollyanna and, I dare say, a disingenuous attitude towards the race problem in America.
In 2023, the Supreme Court, in majority — (not unanimous) — decisions, ruled that university admissions schemes which promoted diversity violated the U.S. Constitution. The following words, written in dissent, by Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson better encapsulate and more clearly articulate the problem of “race neutral laws”, as espoused by her conservative colleagues on the court than this writer ever could:
“Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations. Every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this great country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles — the ‘self-evident’ truth that all of us are created equal.”
“Our country has never been colourblind. Given the lengthy history of State-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry.”
And so, what is the reality of the situation in America, in the final analysis? The establishment and the administration of laws never occur in a vacuum. Laws might appear to be neutral or objective — prima facie — but their application is often quite subjective. One could site many examples from history, but this writer will only refer to one — and that is the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was passed by Congress on February 26, 1869, and which was ratified on February 3, 1870.
And what was the objective of that amendment? It was to grant African American men the right to vote.
One would have thought that the 14th Amendment which made them citizens — prima facie — would have been enough to address their voting rights, but that was not the case due to the dark, stubborn forces of racism which were active then, just as they are active today. And, as we approach the end of 2024 — over 154 years later — what was clearly intended in the 15th Amendment has been stymied, stonewalled, thwarted, circumvented and nullified at every turn by the subjective, sinister and selfish initiatives of white racism against people of colour, often aided by the courts, hence the call for the passing of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And so, Associate Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, in this writer’s humble opinion, was accurate in her dissent.
