By Chris Powell
A century ago and then again 70 years ago there was, if the political hysteria of the times was to be believed, a Red under every bed. Today’s political hysteria imagines a racist under every bed.
But as it was with the Reds of yesteryear, most of these racists are ghosts. The people who affect to see them can’t identify them.
So Connecticut’s General Assembly and town councils throughout the state have passed resolutions declaring racism a “public health crisis” and then have appointed committees to search for evidence supporting the pre-ordained conclusion.
Of course the country is full of racial disparities, but are all racial disparities the result of racist laws and policies and racist government administration — laws, policies, and administration meant and designed to oppress people? And if so, exactly what are those laws and policies and exactly who are those administrators?
In the old days many states had frankly racist laws, policies, and administration. They are infamous today and can be clearly identified. But such identification is not done much today, if only because it doesn’t have to be done for the race mongers to achieve their political objectives, what with nearly everyone being too scared to challenge any accusation of racism, just as in the old days nearly everyone was too scared to challenge any accusation of communism.
Today accusations of racism are simply accepted as long as no individual or agency is specified.
The political right undertook the Red scares of old to intimidate and defeat the political left. The racism scare today is waged by the political left to intimidate and defeat the political right and to extort for the left vast new grants of government patronage that can be dressed up as social justice.
But none of this addresses the most damaging racial disparities, since they are caused by policies that, while failing to reach their nominal objectives, enrich the government class and thus the political left and the race mongers.
For example, for decades Connecticut has purported to try to remediate its mortifying racial gap in school performance. This effort has been mainly to spend a lot more money on schools with large minority populations. But every year most minority students still graduate high school without ever mastering the basics. While this profoundly handicaps them for the rest of their lives, disqualifying many of them from more than menial employment, it still provides great careers for teachers and school administrators.
No one is ever held accountable for this policy failure, and the governor and General Assembly never audit it, for any serious inquiry would explode the two great false premises of education in Connecticut — that school spending correlates with educational performance and that social promotion, exempting students from having to learn anything to be promoted, is better for them than enforcing standards, that as long as students are in school it is better to pretend that they are being educated.
When they leave school and get their rude shock, they are society’s problem.
Examination of the failure of education policy would reveal an even bigger failure — welfare policy’s destruction of the family, disproportionately among minority groups, with its pernicious incentives for childbearing outside marriage and fatherlessness, by which so many children and their households are stuck in poverty rather than raised to self-sufficiency.
Here again too many government employees and contractors draw their livelihoods from the failing policy, so it can’t be examined politically and no one can be held accountable.
Connecticut’s prattling about racism rises to high pitch over trivia like “microaggressions” and nooses left at work sites but ignores the lack of education and fathers for so many minority children. That’s why the prattling about racism is just cover for gaining patronage for the prattlers.
Even a public mobilized against the real racism would have trouble overcoming the special interests that thrive on racial prattle, and the public is ever more demoralized politically, resigned to letting the government class have its way. Saving Connecticut will require some candidates brave enough to say that the state’s racism isn’t where anyone is looking.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 