It would be a nightmare Wheel of Fortune word puzzle, perhaps unsolvable, for a leftist. To wit: “One of the least racist countries on Earth — U_i_ed S__t_s.”
If you don’t have 1619-Project-on-the-brain, you no doubt can solve the puzzle and won’t be surprised that research bears the conclusion out. That is, vindicating earlier studies, author Kathleen Brush visited 114 nations during the course of her “racism” research and has found what common sense informs us:
The United States is among the least racist countries on Earth.
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Author of the book Racism and Anti-Racism in the World Before and After 1945, Brush appeared Thursday on Tucker Carlson Tonight to present her findings.
Among her compelling metrics for measuring “racism,” Brush mentioned that Americans express less displeasure about living next to someone of another race than people in other countries do, with only zero to five percent of Americans saying they objected. “In Iran and Nigeria, it was 30 to 40 percent,” said Brush. “In France, it was 20 to 30 percent.”
(There’s an interesting related infographic here.)
Brush said she was motivated to conduct her research by people such as former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who play the race card to attain power and impugn our nation as inherently bigoted and even as “white supremacist.”
After studying racism the world over for more than 10 years, however, “I know what systemic racism looks like,” the author told host Carlson. “It is opposite to the United States” (video below).
Providing historical perspective, Brush said that American President Franklin Roosevelt “parlayed American victory in World War II to get global powers to agree to end the colonial subjugation of Africans, Asians, and Europeans, and to get all nations to agree to abolish discrimination or to end discrimination.”
Yet while the United States lived up to that promise, Brush said, other nations “didn’t honor their commitments: They just continued right on discriminating as they had before.” She also claimed that these bigoted attitudes explain why parts of the world “still experience slavery, arbitrary detention, statelessness, or just garden-variety privileged and unprivileged people.”
The reality is that if we were a white supremacist nation, we’d be the most incompetent white supremacists in history. As to this, Brush cited how black Americans “are the most prosperous, educated black population in the world.”
In fact, if “one totaled up the earnings and spending of Black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product,” wrote late economics professor Walter E. Williams in June, “we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations.”
The same white supremacist incompetence is apparent in other group outcomes as well. For example, “America’s Latino GDP is the highest GDP of any Latin American nation,” reports Brush. “And that includes Brazil, with 3.5 times the [Latino] population.”
Then there are the Asian-descent Americans, who, inexplicably, the white supremacist power structure has decided to elevate above whites. In fact, they “are the most educated and prosperous racial group in America. Their incomes are 25 percent higher than whites’, on average,” Brush tells us. “For Indian Americans, household income is 60 percent higher.”
Then there’s how our white-power-devised immigration policies have transformed us from being 87 percent white in 1964 to only 60 percent non-Hispanic white today. As for civil rights, everyone enjoys them here; in contrast, you can “only be a citizen of Liberia if you’re black,” Brush mentions.
But there’s a deeper problem here, one that was related, in a way, when actor Morgan Freeman was asked in a 2006 60 Minutes interview, “How are we going to get rid of racism…?”
“Stop talking about it,” Freeman replied.
In America today, we have racism-on-the-brain. Everything seems to be “racism,” always, all the time. Young people often don’t even know the word’s meaning, responding, for example, to critiques of Islam (newsflash: not a race) with “That’s racist!” Having almost become to them a synonym for “bad,” you might half expect to hear when asking a youth on a stormy day how the weather is, “It’s really racist out there, man.”
Philosopher C.S. Lewis addressed this phenomenon in his 1942 book The Screwtape Letters. A demon portrayed therein instructs that one way to corrupt people’s souls is to persuade them to exaggerate their faults. Thus would you want to tell the militarist he’s too pacifistic and the pacifist he’s too militaristic, said the dark angel, presenting an example.
To analogize our characteristic hang-up, imagine a society in which: A man’s Senate campaign is scuttled because, famished one day years before, he was overheard saying, “I could eat a horse!” An actor’s career is “cancelled” because old video emerges of him consuming a half gallon of ice cream in one sitting. A principal is fired because she disseminated on social media numerous recipes and pictures of delectable delights.
This society is a place in which the accusation “You’re gluttonous!” is a reflexive and reliable way to tarnish an opponent, and people fall all over themselves value-signaling about their temperance. “I’m friends with low-cal foods,” a judicial candidate will say — “and I lost 10 pounds last month!”
You might even be more confused if, upon looking around, you see that most everyone is emaciated.
This is a good metaphor for one of history’s least racist countries’ engaging in incessant self-flagellation — for being irredeemably racist.
Note that because of our fallen nature, human beings commit many sins, and “racism” is just one of them — a sub-category of one of the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath. It’s not the end-all and be-all. And so in America today, it is reasonable to ask, how big a problem is racism compared to the problems created by our other sinful tendencies?
Consider: Given that we have sexual imagery and innuendo everywhere, classes in pornography and “sexology” in colleges, and stories of children re-enacting Caligula’s court in schools, can we really make the case that racism is a greater problem in America today than lust?
What about greed? Well, given the Hunter Bidens of the world (laptop scandal), Big Tech pandering to China for profits, rapacious government officials, and the long-accepted maxim about the lust for money being the root of all evil, it just may rank a bit higher in our nation as well.
Sloth? Our welfare state and handout-and-entitlement mentality. Envy? Class warfare. Gluttony? We have more obese people than perhaps the rest of the world combined. Pride? Given how people are loath to admit error — think Senior Slayer Andrew Cuomo’s brazen portrayal of himself as a COVID hero — and the super-size egos that abound, this trumps the small amount of racism that exists in America, too.
Of course, racism-on-the-brain will be encouraged because, well, let’s just say that no politician is going to gain power by preaching chastity and railing against fornication. But aside from being divisive, another problem posed by our racism obsession is that it distracts us from addressing our actual faults.
So maybe we should stop listening to people who’d look at an almost skeletonized man and tell him he needs to go on a diet.
