One of the salient features of wokeism, as applied to critical race theory, is its careful refusal to answer obvious questions. It usually does so by resort to the simple expedient of calling every questioner and every question “racist.” (If you don’t believe me, wait till my next post.) To the cult of the woke, that seems to be all that’s required to dispose of the issue. Most people, like the students in John Rose’s class about which I wrote here, demand a bit more intellectual rigor, a fact that, I believe, will doom CRT to the ash bin of history.
But, since this blog is open to comments, I’d like to hear from someone, anyone, who espouses CRT. I’d like to hear their answers to certain pertinent questions. For example, since CRT holds U.S. society to be racist, root and branch, why is it that over a million people per year, most of them non-white with non-European backgrounds immigrate to these shores? After all, for non-whites/non-Europeans to intentionally leave their homeland, language, loved ones, traditions, customs, etc. in order to enter a world whose sole animating principle is a determined antipathy for non-whites/non-Europeans would seem a bit strange. So, please explain. Are those immigrants stupid? Ill-informed? Have they, in some way, internalized “whiteness?” Or is it something else?
And while you’re at it, here’s related question: when they get here, how is it that they do so well? How is it that their outcomes are, by many important measures, better not only than American blacks’, but American whites’? In your answer, kindly consider these data on incomes of a very wide variety of people of non-native ethnicities, black, white and Asian.
So, explain how Indians in the U.S. have a median household income that’s about twice that of white mericans. But don’t stop there. Also explain how it can possibly be, in a society you call racist to the core, that immigrants from an astonishing 60 different countries, most of which are non-white, have median household incomes that exceed that of native-born white Americans. I look forward to your reply. And, while you’re at it, please include in your explanation how the median household income for black Americans exceeds that of Appalachian whites by a large margin.
CRT maintains that the drive to maintain “white supremacy” lurks at the center of pretty much everything whites do, whether consciously or not. If that’s so, it appears to me that whites are doing a pretty poor job of maintaining our “superiority” by “allowing” so many non-whites from so many different parts of the globe to exceed us in the important category of earnings.
But perhaps there’s something unique about income levels that obscures the sordid reality of white racism that the woke assure us skulks in every dark alley, waiting to pounce. Perhaps we should inquire into other areas of life and society to locate the true racial hatred that so imbues whites. Surely that can be found, for example, in data on interracial crime commission, that must reveal whites’ anti-black racism.
Nope. Despite being just 12.5% of the population, blacks in the U.S. commit far more violent crimes against whites than vice versa. In fact, in 2018, blacks committed about 84% of all black-white crime. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, out of about 563,000 violent interracial crimes, only about 90,000 were committed by whites against blacks, while 473,000 were committed by blacks against whites. If whites are as hateful toward blacks as CRT likes to claim, how to explain those figures?
For that matter, how do the woke explain the fact that, statistically, white police officers are no more likely to use force, including deadly force, against black suspects than are black officers? In a related vein, how do they explain the phenomenon of black case workers with state child welfare authorities being more likely than white case workers to take children from black parents? How can that be “white supremacy” in action?
Good questions all and there are hundreds more where those came from. But I’m content in the knowledge that, very soon now, woke individuals will answer them for me.
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
