The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: The NJ State Budget

This is another installment of my examples of the racism of the Anti-Racist movement. All emphasis in the following excerpts from Black leaders call for an anti-racist state budget by New Jersey Star-Ledger Guest Columnist Brandon McKoy are added by me.

 

The year 2020 has presented several moments of reckoning and reflection for the nation, as the simultaneous crises of COVID-19, a disparate recession, and the fight against systemic racism roil our streets from coast to coast. These moments have laid bare, with great clarity, the wounds of racial injustice and white supremacy foisted upon Black Americans since before the dawning of the country.

 

Right off the bat, the focus is on history. Why?

 

New Jersey is no different. We need an anti-racist budget that invests in communities of color that have been ignored and harmed for far too long, especially during economic downturns like what we are currently experiencing. 

 

A budget that specifically “invests in communities of color” is the very definition of racism. Government spending, to be just--that is, color-blind--should be neutral in regard to the race of the recipients. 

 

For a state with vast riches and access to the most consequential and beneficial resources in the United States, these incredible advantages are not equitably shared or enjoyed.

 

There you have it. The heart of the Anti-Racist agenda; egalitarian criminal socialism. Socialism and racism have a common root; collectivism--the supremacy of the group. The only alternative to collectivism, and thus racism, is individualism. Individualism is the root of capitalism and, more broadly, Americanism. You can’t graft socialism onto an individualist base. Hence, the drive to remainstream racism in American society and law is to lay the groundwork for socialism. If you are anti-socialist, you are a racist. 

 

This is why we must fight for individualism, the only genuine anti-racist creed. These black socialist leaders don’t want the focus on the individual. That would require providing genuine proof of racism or white supremacism individually, the individual being the only human entity and thus the only focus of justice. Eliminate genuine injustice, and you eliminate oppressed groups.

 

The state doesn’t have “vast riches” that it can “equitably share.” These riches are earned by productive individuals who work, voluntary cooperate, and trade. These “riches” belong first and foremost, morally and economically, to the individuals who earn it, and only the individual can rightly share what he has earned. Any legitimate “sharing” is voluntary; any “sharing” of the “riches” of NJ residents by force, including by the state budget, is the action of a criminal. The state may tax it away, and redistribute it. But it does not have a first claim on it. 

 

The Anti-Racists have to ignore this fact of nature--”you didn’t build that”--in order to rationalize away the injustice they advocate; that the government-imposed “equitable sharing” they want is crime by legal means, with a twist of racial favoritism. Collectivism is the moral escape hatch that enables them to evade this truth; if people are judged as parts of groups, rather than on personal individual factors, then anything goes.

 

No matter how outcomes are measured, whether it be household wealth, educational attainment, homeownership, or personal health, Black New Jerseyans lag far behind their white neighbors due to centuries of discriminatory policy choices.

 

Here they turn to statistical disparities. Statistics are interesting, but they don’t tell you anything about individuals, where actual evidence could be found. For example, they talk of “educational attainment” in the context of funding. But educational outcomes in places like Newark have improved dramatically due to the individual parental school choice policies of Governor Chris Christie’s charter school expansion, not more state funding. Even the Leftist Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran credits Christie for this improvement. Yet the only mention of Christie by McKoy is to criticize the “Christie-era tax breaks for wealthy families and big corporations.” Yet they want taxpayer money to perpetuate the traditional monopolist school establishment that thousands of Newark parents, mostly black, seek to escape. No matter. Statistics “say” otherwise. Statistics, of course, are the last refuge of “damned liars”.

 

McKoy gets down to defining “systemic racism”. Quoting Murphy, whose budget they criticize, McKoy writes:

 

When Governor Murphy recently addressed the parishioners of Friendship Baptist Church in Trenton, he said, “I did not decide that Black Lives Matter last week – this has been a lifelong commitment… We cannot escape the fact that systemic racism – not the outward racism of hate groups, but the silent racism of complacency – has bled into nearly facet of our society.”

 

What is meant by “complacency”? Systemic racism has been redefined. It no longer means legal segregation or other race-based law. It now means failure to support the re-systemization of racism according to a socialist agenda. If you are an individualist; if you support equality before the law; if you are not “outward” racist; if you judge and treat people on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, that is not enough. If you are white, and “complacent”--no matter how thoroughly you live by individualism--you are “systemically racist” because you’re white, and don’t support race-tinged socialist schemes. That, people, is textbook racism--your moral standing is determined by factors outside of your control, such as your body chemistry or actions of long-dead ancestors (“the wounds of racial injustice and white supremacy foisted upon Black Americans since before the dawning of the country”). What about your personal convictions and actions? Not relevant, according to the collectivists--just support our socialist schemes.

 

Cuts to public education alone will be devastating — more than half a million dollars in funding has been taken from critical programs like the Amistad Commission and Restorative Justice in Education pilot program, initiatives meant to reduce racial disparities and dismantle structural racism. Budget decisions that prioritize austerity over constructive investments are proven to fail; and history has shown Black people are routinely the biggest victims of such tactics.

 

The “tactics” that have victimized black people is precisely the race-based law they now advocate. Didn’t we learn anything from the Jim Crow era? That was structural racism. McKoy and his ilk want to re-introduce structural racism, apparently believing it’s acceptable as long as white people are the victims. But that is just as wrong as Jim Crow. The very idea of correcting  “the wounds of racial injustice and white supremacy” by imposing racist policies on current people who had nothing to do with the original injustice is itself racist: The very idea that guilt passes down through the chemistry of skin color is textbook racism. This hideous premise ignores the fact that resurrecting the principle of race-based law can be reversed by future politicians, and pave the way for a new Jim Crow era, or something worse.

 

Murphy’s budget proposal doesn’t incorporate the racial coloring the black leaders advocate, yet. Let’s hope he doesn’t cave in to their demands. If bias against “communities of color” have happened, the answer is to objectively and fairly apply standards going forward; i.e., impose the same anti-pollution controls on all industrial plants equally.

 

True, there are lingering negative effects of the systemic racism of Jim Crow laws and the like, such as zoning and government-imposed redlining on the banks. But re-racializing the law is regressive, not progressive. Expanding school choice, restricting the power of zoning boards, and eliminating occupational licensing, in addition to cutting taxes on productive citizens, are some of the steps that should be taken. Statistical equality is not an ideal. It is unjust. “First, do no harm.” Protect individual achievement. Take the 14th Amendment seriously. And above all, protect the inalienable individual rights of all, equally, at all times. The individual is the smallest minority. Defending the rights of minority groups begins with individual rights.

 

Related Reading:

 

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. 

 

Although I don’t agree with some of Rothstein’s proposals, his basic message is that private racism alone--that is,absent government force--could not have segregated America, and that lawmakers’ failure to adhere to the United States Constitution, not the Constitution itself, is to blame.

 

Harriet Tubman Was a Hero for Individual Rights, Not ‘Social Justice’

 

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?--Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

 

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

 

The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics