As the nation’s incipient racial reckoning following last May’s killing of George Floyd morphed into the summer’s riotous anarchy, the term “systemic racism” emerged as a fixture of our public discourse. What began as a somewhat arcane dialogue about purported police “militarization” and the “qualified immunity” legal doctrine soon took on a much more insidious tone. America, those like the New York Times‘ “1619 Project” fabulists told us, was rotten to its very core, blemished by the indelible taint of “systemic racism.”
In reality, as many courageously pointed out amid unprecedented “cancel culture” headwinds seeking to stifle all dissent, there is no such thing as “systemic racism” that afflicts all of America’s leading institutions. Despite the claim attaining mythological status, there is no factual basis to support it. There will, sadly, always be individual racists from all backgrounds and all walks of life, but American society in the 2020s simply does not have anything remotely resembling a legally enshrined regime under which its racial majority “systemically” oppresses its racial minorities. America in the year 2021 is not Germany in 1936; it is not South Africa in 1985; it is not—after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the Jim Crow South. This ought to be astoundingly obvious.