Turning Higher Education and America From Racism

About a decade ago, representatives (academic sociologists) of higher education introduced the American public to the concepts of “unconscious racism” and “systemic racism.” This began the long descent of our national conversation about “racism” that has proved to be the focus of 2020 events and which continues to threaten potential future consequences. This article describes those defining actions by higher education and their public effects. But, first, some overall history.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, America rectified most of its wrongful conscious, individual, or private racism (particularly in the South), applying the founding ideal of equality for all. Continuing Great Society programs found economic equality (which the Founders assigned largely to the individual) not fully achievable. That inequality of outcome was unacceptable to American liberalism.

Beginning in the 1990s, higher education thus inculcated “unconscious group racism” into students as “white privilege” and then “implicit bias” from a racial Implicit Association Test (IAT). Group racism (or Marxism) was preferred over differences in group interests, abilities, cultural values, or family structure—the realities of Western Civilization and democracy—in explaining inequality of outcome.

Behavioral training in unconscious group racism based on “white privilege” and “implicit bias” (and critical race theory) was begun in academic, public, and private organizations, and continues.

In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama was elected and reelected as the first black president. Polls showed satisfaction with black progress in America but blacks themselves said that they were divided into two classes, one driven by black culture and another by work ethic. It became clear to activist liberals and many blacks that routine democratic progress would not provide equal outcomes for the former group.

Influential academic quarters began to promote the novel concepts of “unconscious racism” and “systemic racism.” The media and liberal political leaders focused public attention on those new concepts.

New black intellectual leaders such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, beginning in 2012, and new black activist groups such as Black Lives Matter, founded after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, conveyed the new concept of racism to the general public.

By July 2018, in “The Misappropriation of Madison and Montpelier,” I observed that public liberal institutions were converting the American founding story from equality to slavery and racism.¹ In August 2019, The New York Times published “The 1619 Project,”² telling Americans that their country’s founding ideal had been racism and slavery since 1619 rather than equality since 1776. This project was preceded by a sociological group racism idea from higher education in 2010.

In January 2020, I showed (“Racial Equity and Social Justice—Courtesy of Higher Education”) that my liberal local government had adopted higher education’s identity ideology—that racial oppression and discrimination are the driving force of America, and that resulting racial disparities must be rectified by sweeping social justice policies to achieve equality imposed through coercive state power.³

After the regrettable May death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, what has become the radical Left of young “woke” college-educated liberal-progressives, along with Black Lives Matter activists, staged “peaceful protests” in many city streets against an allegedly widespread, public racism. Such activists have been heroized by a supportive, mainstream media , liberal educational institutions, and many corporate elites.

These activists argue that, because racism is, and has long been, embedded in the public’s unconscious, American revolutionary history must be reconsidered. Originally, our public founding ideal was equality under the law, while some individuals obviously held private racist views, particularly in the South. But now, the public’s unconscious, unaware embrace of racism is seen to void the traditional view of the founding and makes racism rather than equality the overarching ideal.

Given that historical summary, this article will contend that academic sociologists, on behalf of higher education, conveyed the detailed concepts of “unconscious racism” and “systemic racism” to the American public, and will explain why such actions were wrong. I do not expect higher education to correct the profound and intentional errors of its representatives, since both have long believed in Marxism and opposed the founding ideals of America. But such actions remain harmful and could now be considered by the federal government as illegal precursors in the construction of racism as the original and enduring American public attitude.

American Racism Since Around 2010

In January 2007, a Pew Research survey of African Americans found that blacks themselves saw a widening gulf between the values of middle-class and poor blacks. Nearly four-in-ten of those surveyed said that because of the different natures of people within their community, blacks could no longer be thought of as a single race.⁴ Blacks themselves understood that culture and work ethic, rather than racial discrimination on its own, were influential factors in their progress.

By January 2010, a Pew Research report found that blacks’ assessments of the state of black progress in America had improved more dramatically than at any time in the past quarter century.⁵ This seemed an up-to-date confirmation of the earlier finding of higher education sociologists, namely that, sometime after World War II, the Civil Rights Movement coincided with a “precipitous decline in overtly racist attitudes, as measured by representative opinion surveys.”⁶ Commensurately, in January 2009, as Barack Obama was being inaugurated as our first black President, public views of whether “racism” was a “Big Problem” in America were at their lowest recent historic levels—26%—according to Pew Research surveys.⁷ The next survey by Pew in November 2011 showed a similarly low result of 28%.⁸

However, by 2015, the following Pew survey results began to show a marked increase in public opinion that “racism” was becoming a “Big Problem” in America—rising to 50% that year, and then to 58% in 2017.⁹ A 2018 article in New York Magazine found that young, white, college-educated liberal-progressives had moved dramatically to the left on issues of race during that period, and now said that discrimination was the main reason that black people can’t get ahead in America.¹⁰

After the controversial death of George Floyd, activist street demonstrations, and sympathetic media coverage, a Monmouth University poll around June 1, 2020 indicated that the proportion of the public who considered “racism” a “Big Problem” in America had increased to 76%.¹¹

The Federalist recently found further evidence of this shift, reporting that between 2011 and 2019, The New York Times and The Washington Post dramatically increased their usage of the word “racism” and its variations in their coverage—by over 700% and just under 1,000%, respectively.¹² The mainstream media and higher education institutions have, in turn, eagerly reinforced the notion of ubiquitous racism in the larger public.

Why has public perception that “racism” has become a “Big Problem” in America recently risen, over about a decade—from 26% in 2009 to 76% in 2020—when there has been little or no actual change in black progress? What I will summarize below is the impact that higher education has had on public opinion and its view of “racism” by redefining terms and introducing new concepts, such as “unconscious” individual and institutional “racism.”

The Higher Education of Multiple Generations

In “Academic Social Science: Rousseau Redux,”¹³ I summarized the theories of the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who laid the intellectual groundwork for the French Revolution of 1789—later supplemented by Marxism’s rejection of capitalism. Rousseau’s collectivist ideas included the “general will” in lieu of the individual will, one formed by the power of special idealists and enforced by the State, to perfect human nature and the individual, to achieve “absolute equality,” and to provide “social justice.”

Rousseau rejected “majority rule” because individuals would govern in their own interests; believed in liberation from the inequality of private property; and argued that individuals should exist only in a “state of nature” without property or privilege. Academic social science, especially sociology, has implemented Rousseau’s philosophy (along with cultural Marxism) in American higher education.

Until the late-19th century, American higher education taught the principles of 1776 and the Founders.¹⁴ But then came Woodrow Wilson, who first introduced European notions of education and society to colleges and universities, including Rousseau, Marx, and Hegel. Higher education came to support Herbert Croly’s collective “will” of progressive democracy, superseding the rule of law by deliberative representatives. Since that time, college educators further absorbed other emerging “progressive” concepts that increased the power of the group and the State over the individual. This included such ideologies as multiculturalism and diversity, “systemic” oppression of marginalized groups, relativism, and postmodernism, including prominentGerman and French thinkers such as Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault.¹⁵

The academy thus imparted these ideas to ageneration of “educated” college graduates, including the elites who shape public opinion. These elites have been instructed to believe, as Heather Mac Donald observes in The Diversity Delusion:

That human beings are defined by their skin color, sex, and sexual preference; that discrimination based on those characteristics has been the driving force in Western Civilization; and that America remains a profoundly bigoted place, where heterosexual white males continue to deny opportunity to everyone else…¹⁶

The need to plumb the unconscious to explain ongoing racial gaps arises for one reason: it is taboo in universities and mainstream society to acknowledge intergroup differences in interests, abilities, cultural values, or family structure that might produce socioeconomic disparities.¹⁷

The above position accepts the reality that the 1970’s liberal/progressive welfare State did not produce economic equality for disadvantaged blacks; thus, “white racism,” including aspects of “white culture” such as the nuclear family, must have played some role, according to The Wall Street Journal.¹⁸ The radical Left needed a new definition of “absolute equality.”

I previously reported on this shift in “Modern Versus Western Thought: Cultural Determinism,”¹⁹ for as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt noted in 2017:

The left has undergone an ideological transformation. A generation ago, social justice was understood as equality of treatment and opportunity…Today, justice means equal outcomes. “There are two ideas now in the academic left that weren’t there 10 years ago.”One is that everyone is racist because of unconscious bias, and the other is that everything is racist because of systemic racism….

When you cross that line into insisting that if there’s not equal outcomes then some people and some institutions and some systems are racist, sexist, then you’re setting yourself up for eternal conflict and injustice.²⁰

According to Haidt, the academic Left had concluded by around 2007 that its re-orientation to “equal outcomes” to achieve “social justice” also required, for the first time, seeing “racism”—by individuals due to unconscious “implicit bias” and by institutions due to “systemic racism”—as the cause of black inequality, which sociology accommodated. Higher education must accept responsibility for this latest “solution” of its progeny.

Sociology and American Racism

In an academic paper on the “Sociology of Racism” incorporated in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2015), two associate professors of sociology, Matthew Clair from Harvard and Jeffrey S. Denis from McMaster, unintentionally describe how, between the early 2000s and 2020, the representatives of sociology began to ascribe “racism” to Americans, which the public understandably opposes.²¹

There are at least two distinct phases in the sociology of racism, demarcated by the changing nature of race and racism as constructed by social actors and social forces after the Second World War. The 1950s and 1960s…witnessed a shift in how individuals, groups, and nation-states used race in everyday life and social systems. In the West, the…Civil Rights Movement… coincided with the precipitous decline in overtly racist attitudes, as measured by representative opinion surveys.²²

Under the sway of contemporary progressive orthodoxy, new academic sociologists came to believe that America is and always has been a racist society. Thus, as Clair and Denis show, they accordingly redefined American “racism”:

As racist prejudice declined (unevenly)…theories arose to explain why racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequality persisted, emerged, or changed form in some places more than others….The moment may be characterized as the start of the second (and contemporary) phase in the sociological study of racism…as well as manifold new theories to account for the subtlety of present-day racism.

These theories often focus on group-level processes and social structures as opposed to, or in interaction with, the individual. For example, whereas earlier scholars defined racism as primarily an individual problem of overt hostility that could be diminished through interracial interaction,…later sociologists viewed racism as fundamentally rooted in political, economic, and/or status resource competition…under these conditions, intergroup contact could exacerbate the perceived group threat that, in this view, drives racial prejudice and discrimination…²³

Academics, and sociologists in particular, began to seek other ways of characterizing American “racism” and proceeded in multiple directions to identify possible new or alternate causes of black inequality. On the unconscious level, this included the assumption that “implicit bias” led individuals to unknowingly exhibit discriminatory behavior. On the conscious level, many sociologists insisted that “systemic racism” was the cause of widespread racial discrimination. Since the mid-2000s, sociology and other fields have implanted the public psyche with both theories as real and actionable. Since about 1998, “implicit bias” has been the arbitrary basis for all individual behavioral training, ostensibly designed to cure whites of “racism” and “privilege.”

Individual Implicit Bias

In 2013, a sea change began to occur in how the American public visualized “racism.” The academicversion, that “implicit bias” or “unconscious prejudice” causes all Americans to discriminate, was introduced to the public by professors Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji in their book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People,²⁴ which hypothesized that the unconscious predilection to discriminate is a principal cause of racial disparities.²⁵

Blindspot became a national best-seller. The IAT received overwhelmingly positive media coverage, echoing the idea that it “measured something that had implications for real world manifestations of prejudice and discrimination,” as New York Magazine later said.²⁶ Politicians from President Obama on down, the media, and others throughout society began to use “implicit bias” as a hitherto unacknowledged cause of racism and racial disparities.²⁷ Unconscious racism and racial discrimination became ingrained in public thinking. The public began to express the new belief that all Americans are unconsciously “racist.”

Professors Clair and Denis believe that theturn to unconscious “implicit bias” was begun because individual “overt American racist attitudes were found to be in decline” while an “implicit bias” is an unconsciously triggered belief in the inferiority or negative attitude toward a group(s).²⁸

Moreover, Clair and Denis found that research on “implicit biases” had its limitations. Some scholars had questioned the reliability and viability of the IAT, while others had suggested that laboratory experiments on non-representative participants may not have generalized to real-world contexts where behavioral and attitudinal dynamics might differ.²⁹

Even more significantly, soon after 2013 the academic measurement of “implicit bias”—the IAT—was found by representatives from the University of Connecticut, New York University, Rice University, and the University of Virginia to have used flawed methodology. In 2015, just two years after publishing Blindspot, the authors acknowledged that even if “implicit bias” could be shown to exist, it could not be used to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination.³⁰ Then, in 2017, The Chronicle of Higher Education published 20 years of data about “implicit bias”—meta-analysis of which confirmed that changes in measurement don’t lead to changes in behavior. In commenting on that scientific analysis, one of the authors of Blindspot admitted that:

We do not regard [“implicit bias”] as diagnosing something that inevitably results in racist or prejudicial behavior.³¹

“Implicit bias,” while it indeed reflects the assumptions of progressive ideology, is surely not “science.” That fact, however, remains largely unacknowledged in most academic quarters.

Institutional Systemic Racism

In “Sociology of Racism,” professors Clair and Denis identify another of what I consider their discipline’s destructive misconceptions:

One major departure…is contemporary sociology’s shift from locating racism in individual beliefs and attitudes to considering it primarily a phenomenon of non-human entities, such as social processes, social forces, and institutions…Macro structural processes, as opposed to individual acts, provide more meaningful explanations of contemporary racial inequality.³²

In 2010, institutional “systemic racism” was made more explicit when sociologist Joe R. Feagin defined what he named “The 1619 Project”—to demonstrate that America was founded based on slavery. Feagin did so in the book Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations—which preceded “The 1619 Project” publishedby The New York Times in August 2019.

In his book, Feagin uses historical evidence and demographic statistics to create a theory which asserts that the United States was founded on “racism.” He describes American institutions since the founding as based on “systemic racism,” which includes the sociologically redefined ideas of the “disparate impact” of the provision of State “resources” to provide a new “just” equality to groups rather than individuals, creating an entirely new ideology than was available at the American founding or over American history. Moreover, “systemic racism” is based on new identity theories of the permanent oppression of marginalized victim groups.³³

Not only was Joe R. Feagin the first to present “The 1619 Project” to the American public; he also is seen by a summary academic paper and Springer to be the “Social Science Voice of Systemic Racism Theory.”³⁴ Additionally, he has been president of the American Sociological Association (1999-2000) and is a lifelong committed Marxist “who blames capitalism for the perpetuation of American racism.”³⁵

The 1619 Project

In reading National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood’s comments on “The 1619 Project” of The New York Times, I learned of another alleged instance of “white racism,” because I had attended Northern public schools and private colleges:

Four centuries ago, almost every Englishman believed a piece of anti-Spanish propaganda called the “Black Legend.” It presented all Spaniards and all Catholics as uniquely, demonically evil, whose cruelty was proved not least by their barbaric treatment of the Indians. The 1619 Project creates a new kind of Black Legend, which casts Americans as uniquely, demonically evil….

Americans…have been softened up by the pseudo-history of Howard Zinn, whose elaborately distorted vision in A People’s History of the United States [1980] has been swallowed whole by millions….The new Black Legend is already comfortably ensconced in many of our high schools and colleges. The first book college students read very likely treats it as fact….

The campaign to delegitimize America, to recast it as a uniquely evil force for slavery and oppression, has triumphed in a myriad of classrooms of higher education. But it has triumphed even more with college administrators. The vast majority of the bureaucrats who choose common readings, plan events and invite speakers to campus are already true believers in The 1619 Project.³⁶

What does Wood say about the role of higher education in providing this knowledge to such students?

The deans, provosts, and presidents acquiesce in their initiatives, where they do not support them. The institutional stamp of Higher Education tells incoming college students throughout the country: We believe in the Black Legend of American villainy. And The New York Timesis just following their lead. After all, the editors at The New York Times…learned their defamatory history in college.³⁷

Recently, The New York Times has admitted that the American founding should be 1776 rather than 1619, but it continues to assert that the role of slavery and 1619 in history remains very much in play in 2020 public America.³⁸ I will address this in future articles as necessary.

Opposition to Capitalism

In “Capitalism and Western Civilization: Schumpeter,” I wrote that, in his book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1950), Joseph Schumpeter noted the almost universal hostility to capitalism by elites in higher education (and similar societal elites and institutions who are highly subsidized by capitalists), who had become a serious impediment to its functioning. That hostility included “a scorn for market values, envy of market rewards, and a vested interest in social unrest.” And Schumpeter presciently anticipated another of the educational subversions of capitalism:

Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture is the extent to which the bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself in turn to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence.

At present, this means that, from lower schooling through college, our youth have a jaundiced view of capitalism and the bourgeois ethic and little understanding of economics. Schumpeter closed the final edition of his book with the admonition that the ultimate stagnation of capitalism would come from sufficient “help” from the State.³⁹

The current crusade against “white racism” has ominously become a brand-new top priority of its societal compatriots, which City Journal noted in an August 2020 article, “Woke Foundations”:

The Mellon Foundation is hardly alone in abandoning the vision of its founder. Institutions like…Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur…long ago rejected their…belief in capitalism…to follow the latest fads in academia and elite culture. The legacies of these industry titans now flow to the coffers of Marxist scholars who cite racial, gender, or environmental reasons for dismantling our system of free enterprise…

In recent weeks and months, these organizations have moved even further down this path in response to protests, demonstrations, and urban riots. As the Chronicle of Philanthropy noted, “commitments from foundations to combat systemic racism have topped $1 billion” since protests against “systemic racism” began in late May, and the announcements keep coming. “Some are spending money for the first time on efforts to eradicate anti-Black racism,” theChronicle enthuses…because their founders never expected (or intended) that their funds would be allocated in this way.

Foundations form the backbone of what some call the “independent sector.”…Yet today, foundation executives and trustees are rushing to join the new bandwagon led by Black Lives Matter and “social justice” advocates….to bring a more “woke” perspective to their organizations.⁴⁰

At the same time, as I noted in Ordering America, Tocqueville foresaw the difficulties of our emerging “manufacturing aristocracy,” now our “capitalist elite.” America has long sought to temper the excessive inequality that developed since World War II due to many new and complex factors.⁴¹ Higher education has continually envisioned State solutions to that problem, while, at the same time, enjoying the benefits of that system and its elite providers. That effort is a continuing part of a realistic American founding order of 1776.

Conclusion

There may not be a better example of the academy’s flawed Rousseauian/Marxian philosophy of the “perfectibility of man” than its newly-defined, media-enabled message to the public that individual “unconscious racism” and institutional “systemic racism” now characterize America, a message based on their impossible expectation of “equal outcomes” for white and non-white peoples rather than the wisdom of Western Civilization.

If the professoriate were honest, it would have to admit that academic sociology confirms that individual, conscious, private racism was disappearing and was not the main reason for black inequality. Instead, academics have embraced progressive sociologists’ invention of new concepts of unconscious racism based on “implicit bias” and institutional unconscious racism based on “systemic racism” that are perpetrated and experienced by groups. These thoroughly false concepts permitted the progressive Left to implement the misguided Marxist belief in “equal outcomes” and form the bases for Western and American “racism” and “white guilt.”

However, since Marxism has long been the dominant belief system of higher education, the academy is unlikely to voluntarily correct the deliberate actions it permitted but that are fundamental errors of judgment and philosophy. Corrective action will have to come independently from the public—and the State where laws can be applied.

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This is one of an occasional series of articles applying the lessons of Western Civilization to contemporary issues relevant to the academy.

The Honorable William H. Young was appointed by President George H. W. Bush to be Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy and served in that position from November 1989 to January 1993. He is the author of Ordering America: Fulfilling the Ideals of Western Civilization (2010) and Centering America: Resurrecting the Local Progressive Ideal (2002).

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Image: Clay Banks, Public Domain