Spring 2015—Should Race Matters Matter? A Question Americans Should Reconsider

This will be short. This will be simple. This will be straight-to-the-point. Race isn’t a complicated issue.

In fact, it shouldn’t even be an issue at all.

It is with great sadness that I have watched the news media for the past few months being filled with stories of race riots in places like Baltimore, Maryland. We are all fairly familiar with the violence and despair that has set in in the city of Baltimore in recent months. The violence has shown no sign of ending, either. During the months of April and May, at least 31 people were killed in Baltimore, with at least 39 others wounded by gunfire. Twice, 10 people were shot on a single day. We’ve all been led to believe that the inherently racist nature of contemporary American society is to blame for everything that’s been going on in cities like Baltimore.

It’s a story I’ve had rammed down my throat almost all my life. In all my years as a student in America's education system, I've been indoctrinated with the mind-numbing message that "race matters” and that we need to confront this important issue with more conscientiousness about the divisiveness that surrounds the topic. This message is usually accompanied by the assumed premise that American society is inherently racist and that it simply isn’t enough to talk about a colorblind society. As a student at Brigham Young University, I was required to take a multiculturalism class in which the central premise of the course was that Caucasian males are the root cause of society’s inequities, that racial oppression is an inherent feature of the American socio-political landscape. In one of the class periods, the teacher wrote three words on the whiteboard: “pioneer,” “immigrant,” and “refugee.” The teacher then asked us students to share what thoughts came into our heads upon seeing those three words, to share the things we associated with those words. After ten minutes of hearing what we had to share (an experience which contained very little of anything resembling a significant pattern), the teacher suggested to us that the central cause of the American race problem was that white, Protestant Americans looked at the word “pioneer” and snobbishly associated it with positive traits characterizing fellow white people while at the same time associating the words “immigrant” and “refugee” with undesirable low-life brown Hispanics and black African-Americans. The teacher told us that these word associations were subconscious and inherently weaved into the American socio-political psyche. The teacher then launched into a brief lesson outlining that until this racist psychology of contemporary American society was altered, there could never be any real hope of solving the race problem in the United States.

I was infuriated that I was required to sit through such a nonsensical and offensive lesson. It offended me that the very same educational system which told me that racism was wrong was the same educational system which told me that my gender and skin color was the reason I was responsible for America’s race problem. We spend so much time listening to teachers and professors who prattle on about how race matters. Yet, we never seem to muster the courage to tell these teachers and professors that race shouldn’t matter, that race is a shallow identifier that doesn’t deserve to be a manufactured issue at all. Too often, we accept the premise that racism is something we have no control over. In reality, racism is a choice. It’s a choice that many Americans do not make.

Race is a serious issue, but does it have to be? Clearly, people in Baltimore are killing or being killed because of it. But what is the solution to this problem? Do we need to follow the advice of liberal academics who want us to be more sensitive to the issue of race, more aware of it, more conscious of our system’s supposed racial inequity? Do we need to make the issue of race even bigger than it now is?

I submit to you the theory that the killings in Baltimore aren’t happening because race is a problem that needs to be solved; I believe the killings are happening because race is a problem manufactured by people hoping to politicize the issue for their own special interests. The politicization of race is unfortunately occurring at all levels of our society. On May 11^th, Victor Davis Hanson had this to say about how even the First Lady of the United States is guilty of participating in the “racialist” wave currently engulfing our nation:

 

“Michelle Obama — with no further general or midterm elections looming as referenda on her husband’s tenure — has reverted to her 2008 and pre-censored mode of sloganeering (America is a “downright mean country”; “They raise the bar. Raise the bar. Shift it to the side. Keep it just out of reach.”) Recently she told a college audience that African Americans have been “frustrated and invisible” for “decades”. But what does the aggrieved Mrs. Obama’s allegation of black Americans’ being “invisible” mean in the age of African-American ubiquity in high-visibility entertainment and sports, or in light of the careers of billionaires such as Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, or Oprah Winfrey, or national black leaders such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Eric Holder, or Barack Obama? Does she mean “invisible” academics like Cornell West or Henry Louis Gates? Are actors such as Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington “frustrated”? Do university admissions officers practice a sly sort of discrimination against college-age African Americans with impressive test scores and GPAs, as they do in the case of qualified Asian Americans? If Mrs. Obama is apparently referencing Baltimore, then what to make of the fact that three black police officers were co-charged for the alleged murder and assault of a black suspect? And these are officers who work for a black police chief, who in turn serves a black mayor, who in turn reports to a largely black city council — all of whom are overseen by a black state attorney, who again in turn can be audited by a black attorney general of the United States, who serves a black president. Invisible? Frustrated?”

Should race matters matter? Perhaps race needs to be left alone. Perhaps race isn’t important. Perhaps race is nothing more than a set of genetic factors that don’t reflect the content of our character in any substantive manner.

--Christopher Peterson, May 31st, 2015