I'd like to begin this article by saying that racism has been and likely will continue to be a factor in how individuals are treated in this nation. The US is no longer a racist nation, but individuals within it are free to believe whatever they want, and so long as racial disparities in wealth continue to exist, major institutions can and will continue to behave differently in regard to certain racial groups. Whether or not those interactions can be considered "racist" depends upon the specific circumstances.
People can think whatever they want. That includes holding racist beliefs. I don't care if you don't like them and you shouldn't care what they think so long as they don't do any harm to anyone else. That means physical harm, not emotional harm, because as I have said in the past, society doesn't care about your feelings. As much as I despise the notion of an individual holding deeply racist views, many others and I will jump to their defense if their rights are being infringed upon, because freedom of expression is perhaps the most important liberty that we have. It is an inalienable right, even for people that you don't like.
In regards to wider institutional forms of racism, there are examples of this in the DOJ reports for the Ferguson and Baltimore police departments, in addition to a study conducted by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan which revealed that job applicants with "white" sounding names received fifty percent more callbacks than applicants with "black" names, despite the fact that the resumes sent out had the exact same qualifications.
I'm not writing this to argue that racism simply vanished from this country after the civil rights movement, because it didn't. Rather, I want to discuss the erroneous notion that this nation is racist. For the most part, this notion is peddled by democrats and liberals (my so-called comrades in arms).
Perhaps most commonly cited as evidence of racism is the killing of unarmed black men by police officers and the subsequent riots that break out. This matter is extremely complicated, but in a nutshell, very few unarmed black men are killed in this nation, about 50 last year out of a population of 40 million black people (about 50 unarmed white men were also killed in the same year), and they are killed by police disproportionately because a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by and against black Americans.
You can read more information here if you want, I dedicated an article to the subject: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/failure-black-liv...
Another commonly cited concept is the idea that we live in a white supremacist society. Many now believe that so-called "white privilege" is the largest (or one of the largest) determining factors in whether or not you are wealthy. If you believe that is the case, here are some facts you might find interesting:
Asian American median household income is 74,000 dollars per year, compared to 57,000 dollars per year for White Americans.
By ancestral nationality, the top three earners in this country are Indian, Taiwanese, and Filipino Americans.
Nigerian American household income is significantly higher than White American household income, and almost two-thirds of Nigerian Americans hold college degrees. In addition, Ghanaian-American household income is roughly equal to that of Whites.
In fact, Japanese, Chinese, Lebanese, Iranian, Turkish, Palestinian, Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian, Armenian, Guyanese, Vietnamese, and Korean Americans all have more household income than White Americans.
The two highest earning religious groups in this country are Jews, with 46 percent of Jews with incomes exceeding 100,000 dollars per year, and Hindus, with 43 percent earning the same amount.
The concept of white privilege is stupid. Leftists and progressives are happy to trumpet the narrative that White Americans are the "oppressor" and are successful because of their exploitation of other races, but they aren't so keen to say the same thing about Asian Americans or Jewish Americans, because that destroys their pre-arranged narrative that white, Christian, heterosexual males dominate the country with an iron fist. This is despite the fact that many minority groups in this country are far more successful than "traditional" White Americans.
Our two-term president and the first family are black. The attorney general and the one before her are both black. Two previous secretaries of state are black, and one of them was a four-star general (Colin Powell). Justice Thomas is black and Justice Sotomayor is Latina. The highest paid actor in the world, Dwayne Johnson, is black. Oprah Winfrey is a publicly celebrated individual worth 2.9 Billion dollars and she's black.
Blues, Jazz, Hip-hop, and Rock and Roll were all traditionally black forms of music, and all of them have been accepted by and now dominate the mainstream. Some of the most recognizable and well known American celebrities are black, as well as many of our most celebrated intellectuals.
Do we live in a racist nation? Do we really even need to ask that question?
