I take my text from Lionel Lokos, who, in his strongly worded novel ‘The New Racism,’ said this: “ruthe New Racism is fervently convinced that it can use tools of discrimination to find equality; that the positive discrimination that today favors Negroes is somehow more saintly than the discrimination that favored whites in the past.“ In his controversial novel, Lokos asks and in turn answers his question ‘if it is wrong to discriminate against the minority, how much more wrong is it to discriminate against the majority?’ Discrimination against whites won’t solve the problems of Negroes he maintains calling special attention to the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims, the Republic of New Africa and similar “terrorists.” According to a survey released in 2014 by the Public Religion Research Institute, 52 percent of white Americans said they believe discrimination against them is equal to discrimination faced by black people and other minoritiesю
In Manisha Krishnan‘s Vice article ‘Dear White People, Please Stop Pretending Reverse Racism Is Real‘ she says that racism is based on historical and systematic oppression and power. “As far as history goes, white people have never been persecuted for the colour of their skin—so there’s no point comparing their experiences to those of black, brown, and Indigenous folks,” she claims. But this is not the first instance where our non-colored counterparts have felt as though racial equality meant inequality for whites. I move next to George Bush, who, in an address to the United Nations on September 23, 1991, said this of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism: “Zionism is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people. r . .And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and indeed throughout history,” What happened after the Second World War was that the survivors of the Holocaust established a state centered on Jewish history, values, and traditions.
What President Bush objected to was the sleight of hand by which these actions were declared equivalent because they were both expressions of racial exclusiveness. Ignored, as Bush said, was the historical difference between them–the difference between genocide and the determination of those who escaped it to establish a community in which they would be the makers, not the victims, of the laws. He goes on to explain: “The Nazis’ conviction of racial superiority generated a policy of systematic genocide; the Jews’ experience of centuries of persecution in almost every country on earth generated a desire for a homeland of their ownю If you manage somehow to convince yourself that these are the same, it is you, not the Zionists, who are morally confused” As to the claims that no white person today is responsible for the slavery or oppression of black folks and that all ethnic or indigenous peoples no matter the background have just as much if not more privilege as their non—colored counterparts, I can’t help but roll my eyes and hit them hard with the facts.
The wealth of white households is 13 times the median wealth of black households Black children represent 18% of the nation’s preschool enrollment but make up nearly half of all children with multiple suspensions. And prison sentences for black men are nearly 20% longer than those of white men convicted for similar crimesi But these white privilege statistics are never actually accounted for as privilege; or even as actual facts for that matter. David Horowitz, author of ”Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream” once said: “The fact that white people are better off is not a privilege; it’s earned…not all racial disparities are inherently racist,“ he says ”If racial disparities prove discrimination, then the National Basketball Association is racist, probably 90 percent of its players are black.”
This coming from a heterosexual, caucasian male birthed into a wealthy family; a man who could possibly speak fondly of sexual assault and be voted president or even rape an unconscious woman in public and only be sentenced to 3 months behind bars. As Stanley Fish points out in his 1993 article ‘Reverse Racism, or How the Pot Got to Call the Kettle Black’ written for and published in The Atlantic, Blacks have not simply been treated unfairly; “they have been subjected first to decades of slavery, and then to decades of second-class citizenship, widespread legalized discrimination, economic persecution, educational deprivation, and cultural stigmatization.
They have been bought, sold, killed, beaten, raped, excluded, exploited, shamed, and scorned for a very long time” The word “unfair” is hardly an adequate description of our experience, and the belated gift of “fairness” no longer to discriminate against them legally is hardly an adequate remedy for the disadvantages that discrimination has produced Racism in America being in a much better place now is correct in a sense; loud and public acts of racism are no longer as prevalent in the US as they were in the past. However, today racism is stealthy and unspoken, and often deftly covered up with fabricated cover stories to legitimize the discrimination, I would like to close my speech on the topic with a quote from Stanford historian George Frederickson. “The legacy of past racism directed at blacks in the United States is more like a bacillus that we have failed to destroy, a live germ that not only continues to make some of us ill but retains the capacity to generate new strains of a disease for which we have no certain cure.”
