From Holman Jenkins at the WSJ, Progressives Punish ‘Honorary Whites’ but Aren’t Helping Blacks (7/16/21)

One premise of critical race theory is certainly correct: Today is built on a foundation of yesterdays. On the foundation of slavery, Jim Crow and housing segregation nowadays is built the exploitation of black communities by multicultural elites playing their “defund the police” games at the expense of blacks who suffer the lion’s share of violent crime.

On the foundation of past discrimination and marginalization of the black community is built the union power that advantages itself at the expense of inflicting inferior educations on black children.

In response to centuries of antiblack discrimination has risen an “antiracist” alliance of university activists who work to cheapen the educational attainments of blacks by relaxing the standards that apply to them.

Most of all, if critical race theory is concerned with the historical pathologies that give rise to present inequities, it fails spectacularly when it doesn’t name among those pathologies the Democrats’ near monopoly on black voters. Think how different our partisan politics would be if not for the simple fact of many blacks being concentrated in certain geographic areas thanks to the legacy of housing bias.

The same solution has been bruited and bruited and bruited in Chicago at least since the early Obama years, when the city’s murder rate began heading in the wrong direction. Even so, most Chicago neighborhoods saw declining murders. Guess which voting bloc has borne almost the entire brunt of the homicide epidemic? If critical race theory were critical in any meaningful sense (a more descriptive name might be self-satisfied race theory), it would critically explain why those politicians most answerable to black voters seem to do so little to improve their lot.

 

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