Betraying a conspiracy mind-set, she opines that whites are “carefully taught” not to recognize white privilege, just as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” she wrote. One wonders who “meant” her—and other whites—to remain oblivious. Adam Smith, perhaps? Ronald Reagan? “White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.… I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.”
So she decided to “work on” herself by listing the daily effects of white privilege in her life, which included such items as, “I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.… If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.… I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.… I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.… I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.”46 This is a small sampling of her “privileges,” which she wrote down to force herself to “give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.” Here again we see a devaluation of the principles of merit, freedom, and equal opportunity. If leftists succeed in convincing people that a merit-based society is unattainable, they will have destroyed a central pillar of the American idea.
The oppressor–oppressed worldview of white privilege and intersectionality is aligned with neo-Marxism and “privilege theory.”47 It’s natural, then, that the neo-Marxist notion of “white privilege” evolved into social doctrine among progressive activists.48 Karl Marx divided the world into categories of the oppressors and the oppressed with his zero-sum class ideology, which pitted the bourgeoisie against the proletariat and saw capitalism as the systemic oppressor. In modern times, leftists have repackaged Marx’s divisive framework and furtively adapted it to forms of oppression beyond the economic class struggle, such as race and gender, pitting identity groups against one another with the ultimate goal of instituting socialism out of the chaos.49
Each category has different sets of oppressors and oppressed. With race it’s whites versus minorities; with gender it’s males versus females and heterosexuals versus gays and transgenders. Philosophy professor Jason Barker, in a New York Times op-ed idolatrously titled “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!,” giddily boasts that “racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the ‘eternal truths’ of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.”50
Neo-Marxist philosophy is inherently defeatist and at war with the American idea because it rejects equality of opportunity even as a goal. Because of different privileges enjoyed and disadvantages suffered by various identity groups, meritocracy and opportunity are unattainable. People succeed not because of their efforts or abilities but because of their privilege. The only solution is to replace capitalism with socialism. Only government can remedy the privileges that capitalism confers.
MIDDLE-CLASS FOOT SOLDIERS
Capitalism, according to many neo-Marxists, doesn’t just cause class oppression but racial oppression as well. “Capitalism is a system that breeds class oppression and national/racial conquest,” writes Edna Bonacich. “The two forms of exploitation operate in tandem. They are part of the same system that creates inequality, impoverishment, and all the other host of social ills that result. I believe you cannot attack capitalism without attacking racism. The two are Siamese twins, joined together from top to bottom.”51 Bonacich regards capitalism as innately flawed and incapable of eliminating poverty—it “depends on exploitation.” Private property owners become wealthy on the backs of “propertyless” laborers, who work for them and rent their buildings. But for the have-nots, there could be no “haves.” Capitalism can’t rid itself of poverty. “It requires poverty. Poverty is the basis of wealth.… To repeat, the wealthy depend on poverty for their riches. They are committed to it, wedded to it. They cannot do without it.… Capital accumulation depends on exploitation, and exploitation both requires and reproduces poverty.”52 Once again, we see the socialist notion of finite wealth, a mind-set that is impervious to the concept of economic growth and wealth creation. With a fixed amount of wealth and no way to expand it, it follows that the social planners must step in and fairly redistribute it. Here we also see the regrettable philosophical basis for the left’s contempt for the wealthy.
Bonacich bastardizes the term “racism” to support her theory that capitalism and racism are joined at the hip. For her, “racism is a system of exploitation.” It is a mechanism to control and oppress people to extract maximum profits from them. By redefining racism she’s able to explain away the rise of the black middle class that was occurring when she wrote her article in 1989. The upward mobility of blacks didn’t mitigate racism because the black middle class, “like the white middle class, are part of the structure of oppression of the black poor and working class.” She maintains that “the United States continues to be a deeply racist society” in at least two central respects. “First, it consists in the continued exploitation of people of color for profit. Second, it is demonstrated in the demand that people of color must accommodate to the white man’s system, rather than vice versa.” Capitalism, she insists, “is based on vicious inequality.” The ruling class pays lip service to racial equality but openly opposes social equality. It pretends to open the doors of opportunity to blacks, but the system demands that people of color adapt to the white man’s culture. “They have to play by the white man’s rules.”
But what evidence exists that “the system” demands that minorities adapt to “the white man’s culture?” If that’s the case, why is black culture so popular? Why do politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke strain to co-opt minority identities? As Victor Davis Hanson asks, “Why did California congressional candidate Kevin Leon rather abruptly become Kevin de León, emphasizing an ethnic cachet—if ‘whiteness’ equaled unearned advantage and non-whiteness earned lifelong discrimination?” Other examples include Professor Ward Churchill, who masqueraded as a Native American for career advancement,53 and Rachel Dolezal, who became Spokane NAACP chapter president while pretending she was black.54
Elaborating on her conspiratorial view of capitalism as an innately exploitive system, Bonacich says it’s not just the wealthy who exploit the poor but the foot soldiers in the middle class who “are paid out of the profits squeezed from the poor in order to keep the poor under control.” The middle class helps to manage the poor. They are the guardians of this pernicious inequality, ensuring that capitalism extends through the generations, and they are paid “handsomely” for their efforts. The education system, whose competitive nature is modeled on capitalism, is a feeder of the middle class and its values. “The schools are a great sorting machine for the unequal hierarchy of wealth and privilege that is American capitalism.” The teachers validate this process, and “help to label the poor as incompetents, as failures, as unworthy, and therefore deserving of dispossession.”
Bonacich says the great myth of the educational system is that the pursuit of individual achievement will maximize social benefit—that the greatest good comes from selfishness and that the benefits of competition will trickle down to everyone, which she iden
tifies as “the self-delusion of capitalism in general, and imperialism in particular.” Once again, she implicates the middle class in this sham. They view their own advancement while others are starving as “a mark of their uprightness,” and they claim to be role models to the poor. She also blames capitalism for the ghetto. “It epitomizes the social decay of capitalism. This is what the ‘free market’ produces.”
Bonacich further indicts the black middle class. “They are forced to become police for the white man’s system.… They have to participate in supporting capitalist rule. They have to help in the extraction of the surplus from the poor.” Like most leftists, Bonacich has a pat answer for everything. The growth of the black middle class, she says, doesn’t disprove the reality of America’s racial oppression but intensifies it. The existence of a black middle class, you see, impedes the black poor from seeing themselves as victims of racial oppression. Far from showing the decline of racism, it signifies a new chapter in the evolution of American prejudice. Coming close to denouncing the black middle class en masse as Uncle Toms, she claims they are putty in the hands of white elites who “are forever devising new strategies to consolidate their rule.”
Bonacich sees wealth redistribution and other welfare policies as commendable but inherently limited. As long as our system features private ownership of productive property, which is used to profit the owners, there will always be an impoverished class, likely consisting largely of minorities. “The class relations of capitalism inevitably involve drainage of wealth from the poor to the rich, and no redistributive programs can ever remotely counter the basic direction of this flow.” Her solution is not to lobby the government for change but to overthrow it. “Just as the private property in slaves was once confiscated, so the owners of the corporations that rule this nation will one day have to be dispossessed.” Bonacich didn’t see revolution on the horizon, however, because all the major institutions—schools, media, etc.—were firmly in capitalist hands—which is odd, since the left had long since ensconced itself in the media and schools when she wrote this piece in 1989.
For Bonacich, even large-scale upward mobility among blacks would not improve many black lives. It would just serve to assimilate blacks into the corrupt capitalistic system—“accepting the dominant order and fitting into it.… Jobs in the white man’s system is not the answer.” Instead, blacks need to build alternative economic systems that they control—not capitalist systems but collective ones. Racism, in her view, is forever intertwined with capitalism. It is “one of the major mechanisms by which private capital retains its rule.”55
RADICAL IDEAS HAVE BECOME MAINSTREAM
This is a sick, jealous, and loveless ideology whose legitimacy depends on class and race conflict and can permit no meaningful improvement in social mobility or race relations. Socio-economic classes are fixed, and there can be no real assimilation. As such, any objective evidence of improvement is denied or explained away. This us-against-them mind-set is the core of progressive morality. Christian writer Jayme Metzgar articulates it well. “While adherents of progressivism may sincerely believe they’re working to end oppression, the fact is that their model of morality requires oppression in order to exist,” writes Metzgar. “It requires that someone always be cast in the role of oppressor, whether he or she deserves to be or not. Any final end to oppression and evil—any real peace, unity, or brotherhood—is impossible.”
This explains why Bonacich felt threatened by successful blacks. “Instead, they needed to rebuild their own communities, with Black, not white, needs and interests, as the central, human concern.” In her view, racial harmony and color blindness are not lofty ideals but insidious tricks. Black upward mobility is merely a ruse to entice them to abandon their identity and to be forever relegated to white domination and exploitation.
Some apologists dismiss Bonacich’s cohort as radicals who are not representative of leftist or liberal thinking at that time or even now. But if you believe their ideas haven’t matriculated into the culture, you haven’t been paying attention. This is the stuff of mainstream gender studies and critical race theory classes on nearly every college campus today. Their ideas have now insinuated themselves into mainstream Democratic Party thinking. Democrats are deeply invested in perpetual struggles of race, class, and gender, and are pursuing policies so radical as to annihilate our entire existing economic structure. It is naïve to view these ideas as anything but seminal and today’s Democratic initiatives as anything but a logical outworking of this radicalism.
Modern leftism is a secular religion, and there are many denominations that often overlap, from the church of environmentalism to socialism, cultural Marxism, identity politics, and intersectionality. Metzgar notes that many religious traditions seek to answer the question, “What is good, true, and beautiful?” In Christianity, God is the answer to all three. But progressivism, without the benefit of moral absolutes, has settled on a simplistic moral standard that refines sin to the single category of oppression.
Metzgar argues that progressives see history as the moral force that moves toward progress. There is certainly truth in this. Marx clearly subscribed to this general notion, and the progressive worldview rejects the Christian biblical doctrine of man’s fall, believing instead that man, through science and reason, marches toward enlightenment. Metzgar contends that the progressive moral framework leads to the inescapable conclusion that victimhood is the highest virtue. “Victims and members of oppressed identity groups are elevated to a kind of sainthood in the progressive religion,” writes Metzgar. “Those who are more oppressed have more moral authority and are thus more worthy to speak, set policy, and make demands. This is in fact exactly what intersectionality teaches, complete with a hierarchy of victimhood for comparing everyone’s relative righteousness.”56
Indeed, there is no way to explain their stubborn adherence to an ideology so rife with contradictions other than to understand that it’s a matter of faith. This helps to explain why so many Americans are desperately trying to be victims, even to the point of faking their identities or orchestrating hoaxes to validate their victimhood. In the next chapters we’ll see how these radical ideas permeate the left’s entire political agenda today.
CHAPTER THREE Turning Color Blindness into a New Heresy
CRITICAL RACE THEORY
While the overwhelming majority of African Americans consistently vote Democrat, this coalition is more fragile than it might appear, as black voters are decidedly more religious and more socially conservative than white liberals.1 By voting for Democrats they are voting against their own economic interests, as demonstrated by record-low minority unemployment levels and rising wages under President Trump. The left responds by invoking racial politics to distract minorities from bread-and-butter issues—and to ensure they believe the lie that Republicans and conservatives are racist. Black conservative commentator Candace Owens emphasized this in a House hearing on white nationalism and hate crimes, observing that Democrats are using “fear-mongering, power, and control” and terms like “white nationalism” to scare blacks and keep them in the liberal fold.2
The left’s incessant clamoring for a “national conversation” on race rings hollow because its members don’t seek an actual dialogue, just more opportunities to lecture and shame conservatives and score political points. Why would leftists want to converse when they have so much to teach and nothing to learn from us? Based on our political preferences alone, they condemn us as racists. Whether or not leftist leaders actually believe this lie, they convince minorities they believe it, which causes incalculable damage to race relations and the fabric of society. We must pray this begins to change.
Racial politics is a different subject than it was fifty years ago. The left has not only abandoned Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a harmonious, color-blind society but now denounces the very concept of color blindness as a right-wing deception. King, as previously noted, wanted African Americans to have full access to the
American dream, to enjoy equality of opportunity, and to integrate into society. But seeds were planted in the late 1980s that would steadily undermine this vision.3
At that time a concept emerged in legal scholarship known as critical race theory (CRT), which holds that institutional racism is engrained in the fabric and systems of American society and American culture. Our power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which persist despite the rule of law and the constitutional guarantee of equal protection.4 That is, CRT denies that the law is neutral and color-blind and that minorities who work hard can achieve success. To the contrary, institutional racism ensures systemic, insurmountable inequalities.5 Egalitarianism and meritocracy are merely parts of a false narrative promoted by people of wealth, power, and privilege. Indeed, critical race theorists maintain that most people only view the more obvious forms of racism as problematic, but there are vast, additional aspects of racism that are concealed beneath an appearance of normality.6
According to CRT, racial inequality arises from social, economic, and legal differences that white people create to maintain dominance over minorities, which leads to poverty and criminality among minorities.7 Consequently, CRT advocates policies and laws designed to benefit minorities and help them overcome the institutional racism they face.8
William Voegeli observes that critical race theory is hostile to America’s founding ideas. “The left’s attitude today toward civil equality, inalienable rights, and government by consent of the governed, ranges from indifference to hostility,” writes Voegeli. In their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic similarly argue that “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law.”9
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