US President Joe Biden is determined to use racial bigotry and hostility for political purposes, certainly as determined to do so as Donald Trump. But Biden, at least in his contemporary form, comes to his exploitation of racism via a slightly bowdlerised version of critical race theory.
The same ideas, in one form or another, infuse much of the bureaucrat, NGO and political class in Australia. This was evident in a slightly terrifying article in The Age by Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman. He argued that Australia was structurally, systemically racist and that a vast new whole-of-nation effort had to be made to eradicate all traces of this systemic racism.
Any government foolish enough to act on this preposterous assertion would condemn Australia to a viciously counter-productive obsession with race, whereas a noble objective of liberalism is to remove race from civic considerations.
Biden delivered a disgraceful presidential speech to a predominantly black college, Morehouse, in which he stoked racial grievance and hostility for base political motives.
But first a word on racism itself. Racism is a human evil. To call Australia a racist society, as compared to any other society, is manifestly ridiculous unless we assume that every society on Earth is racist. (I suppose you could argue that those few societies which exclude all other races – such as North Korea – are not internally racist, but I don’t think that’s a good model.) In the real world, we may as well say that Australia is prideful, greedy, wrathful, envious, gluttonous, lascivious and slothful. That is, we, like everyone else, are afflicted by the seven deadly vices.
But as a society, we have devoted half our land mass to native title. We have peacefully and voluntarily transformed from White Australia in the 1950s to now having almost one in three Australians born overseas. We have the most racially non-discriminatory immigration program in the world, with in many years our leading immigrant source being India or ethnic Chinese. Racial discrimination is illegal in Australia. Our racial intermarriage rates are very high. This happens because no one marries a race, they marry an individual they fall in love with.
Of course there is racism in Australia, as there is everywhere, just as there is greed, sloth, etc. Human beings are a fallen species, we suffer original sin. But to claim Australia is structurally racist, or racist compared with any other society on Earth, demonstrates a fantastic triumph of ideology over reality.
Countless families, like my own, are thoroughly multiracial. I went to Catholic schools in inner Sydney in the 1960s that were already strikingly diverse racially – loads of Celts, but also Italians, Greeks, Lebanese, Balts, already a good sprinkling of Asian, ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia, Papua New Guineans, Singaporeans, a few Aboriginal kids. We didn’t have formal multiculturalism then, but I never saw a racial dispute in the playground and routinely had friends from all those different groups.
But if you obsess about race, you will eventually generate vast racial hostility.
Back to Biden. The President is concerned that many Africa-Americans, and even more Hispanics, are supporting Trump. This goes against identity politics and critical race theory, under which they are supposed to regard their whole society as intrinsically unjust, and support only those politicians who promise continued social revolution.
So Biden effectively told black college students their nation hated them and that they were living in a structurally unjust society, a massively destructive, untrue and irresponsible message. He seemed to say: “Only I can fix it.”
In many ways it was a typical word salad of Biden incoherence and mawkish self-referential sentimentalism. But there were some clear sentences. Biden said: “What does it mean to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?
“It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you. What is democracy if black men are being killed on the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leaves black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? If black men are being killed on the streets, we bear witness. For me, that means to call out the poison of white supremacy, to root out systemic racism.”
Biden praised himself for appointing a black woman to the Supreme Court and boasted he had more African-Americans in high places than any previous president.
He seemed to apply critical race theory to foreign policy, rhetorically asking: “What is democracy if we can’t stop wars that break out and break our hearts?”
Critical race theory and the idea of structural, systemic racism are particularly poisonous and destructive because, like all mad ideology, they are unfalsifiable. More than that, groups are defined as intrinsically hostile to each other based on their race, removing moral agency and elementary humanity from individuals, reducing them instead to racial categories.
No one from the bad group is ever innocent, because they perpetuate and benefit from structural and systemic racism, and no one from the good group is ever guilty because their behaviour is caused by the ravages of structural racism.
Thus you end up, perversely, with racism being enacted in the name of anti-racism. This is, in some part, what lies behind the shocking spread of the most toxic form of racism in Western societies today, anti-Semitism. This river of hate, massively exacerbated by the conflict in Gaza, is fed by two main source streams. One is traditional Arab and Islamist anti-Semitism. The other is contemporary critical race theory and all the other Marxoid ideology that motivates green and other far-left movements in society today, for whom Jews are first and foremost Western colonists and oppressors, and therefore can never be victims.
Douglas Murray, in The Madness of Crowds, pithily expressed the essence of critical race theory: “This is the idea that since everything is set up by a structure of white hegemony, every single thing in that structure is laced through with implicit or explicit racism, and that therefore every single aspect of it must be done away with.”
Australians overwhelmingly rejected the real racism inherent in identity politics when they voted overwhelmingly against the voice. This was a pro-Aboriginal vote, a vote that no Australian should be imprisoned in any racial category. Racism is a human evil that must always be rejected. As Biden’s appalling speech demonstrates, the left, by obsessing with race, consciously conjures that evil to manipulate its victims into giving it their votes. That’s racial evil.
More Coverage
Join the conversation
How to halt the downfall of Western civilisation
At the heart of this problem in the West is feeble leadership. Instead of clear moral positions on international issues, Western political leaders are just responding to the vagaries of public opinion.
Read more
Blayney gold mine buried under Labor’s short-term myopia
The curse of short horizons can afflict even the best prime ministers. Yet the Albanese government betrays no ambition for long-term reform. It betrays little ambition for anything beyond winning the next election.
Read more