Systemic Racism: DNA of the Democratic Party
Leopards can't change their spots...
Letting the Democratic Party control the narrative on race is like letting Boss Tweed control the narrative on election reform.
[Author’s note: I first published this essay a couple of years ago on Jeff Einstein 2.0. Republished it here some months ago, but never distributed it to my new reader base. Nevertheless, it has attracted a pretty steady stream of readers and likes since. Publishing it again today with two caveats: first, I don’t want my utter disdain for the Democratic Party to be confused with any affection — where none exists — for the Republican Party. Second, it is my belief that at this point in time the Democratic Party is — by far — the most powerful and dangerous political institution on the planet.]
I would like to take issue with conservative commentators and politicians who deny or dismiss the existence of systemic racism. The understandable haste to distance ourselves from the noxious fumes of racism keeps truth and freedom on the defensive when both would be much better served by the aggressive exposure of systemic racism for what it truly is: the living, breathing DNA of the Democratic Party.
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The sad irony lurking in the incessant claims of systemic racism that now preempt and corrode all public discourse on every conceivable issue resides not in the fact that it doesn't exist but in the fact that almost all of said claims arise from acolytes of a political party whose DNA is hopelessly infused with and utterly reliant upon systemic racism to survive. From slavery to the KKK to Jim Crow to mass incarceration to broken welfare families to failing inner-city schools to black-on-black crime to BLM to Critical Race Theory and the wholesale abandonment of equality for the tyrannies of equity: absent the pernicious and cynical terror of systemic racism against people of color, the Democratic Party would suffocate and perish in a heartbeat.
Ironic also because the most consistent, enduring and unabated characteristic of any major political party anywhere in the world over the past two centuries has been and remains the Democratic Party’s unquenchable lust to own or otherwise control the lives of black and brown people.
Even the most cursory examination of American history exposes the Democratic Party as the undisputed purveyor and champion of systemic racism:
Prior to the Civil War, the Democratic Party defended and enforced the institution of slavery while the Republican Party was formed in 1854 with the expressed purpose to abolish slavery and prevent its spread to the Western Territories. Towards the end of the war, the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery was vigorously opposed by Democrats in both the House and Senate.
After Lincoln’s assassination (at the hands of a Democrat), Andrew Johnson (also a Democrat) and the Democrats in Congress opposed passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 — all unsuccessfully, but not for lack of effort.
Southern Democrats fought tooth and nail against Reconstruction, while the overwhelming majority of southern Republicans were — you guessed it — black. From 1865 to the turn of the 20th century, black Republicans elected more than 1500 black officials to local, state and federal office. By contrast, the first black Democrat didn’t appear in Congress until 1935.
The informal Compromise of 1877 — in which southern Democrats promised to respect the nascent citizen and voting rights of blacks — effectively ended Reconstruction. Not surprisingly, the withdrawal of Federal troops gave rise to immediate efforts by the same Democrats to institute Black Code laws designed to restrict black business and property ownership, ensure that black citizens remained unarmed, and keep them away from voting booths. Of course, all of the above was brutally and lethally enforced by the Democratic Party over the next eight decades of Jim Crow segregation by their very own homegrown terrorist organization: the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK’s reign of terror in the Jim Crow South finally ended with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but not before Democratic Senator and former “Exalted Cyclops” Robert Byrd’s failed 14-hour filibuster.
Though illustrative, the above chronology is far from complete, and apparently far from over as systemic racism continues to this day as the dominant currency of the Democratic Party. Today’s blue cities — many under Democratic Party control for generations — offer stark witness to systemic racism designed to guarantee and enforce the fealty of black and brown Americans for generations to come.
To wit, the Democratic Party alone owns the two great civil rights issues of the 21st century (three, if you count abortion): education and black-on-black violence — both stellar examples of systemic racism at work.
Laws that condemn the poorest black and brown children in the poorest urban neighborhoods to the worst possible schools on behalf of the political money laundering scheme we call the teacher’s unions constitute little more than an overtly racist and updated subset of Black Code laws designed to prevent people of color from escaping the generational poverty imposed and enforced by Democratic Party politicians for the past 150 years. These school systems — all of which promote equity first and foremost in a professed holy war against systemic racism and white supremacy — are in fact systemically racist to the core. As such, they all but guarantee a marginal and impoverished existence for the children they abuse and hold as de facto prisoners in the name of equity and inclusion — by design. For the young boys and girls of inner-city school systems in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and other corrupt one-party Democratic towns, systemic racism begins in kindergarten.
Accordingly, those who would seek out and find Jim Crow 2.0 everywhere except in their own bathroom mirrors would be well-advised to look no further than our largest inner-city school systems: by any measure, among the most soul-crushing and segregated institutions in the country. That almost all of them are run by Democratic Party mayors with Democratic Party city councils and Democratic Party school boards flush with union cash goes without saying. The Democratic Party slumlords of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with professional race baiters in corporate media and the school unions, have enriched themselves at the expense of their poorest constituents for decades. Clearly, they wouldn’t have it any other way.
Black-on-black crime in major cities across the nation is another loathsome creation of the Democratic Party plantation masters. According to the CDC, more children of color in Chicago were fatally shot in 2021 than perished from Covid in the state of Illinois throughout the entire pandemic. Yet equally loathsome Democratic Party mayors (there hasn’t been a Republican mayor in Chicago since 1931), their cohorts in a Democratic Party city council, and Democratic Party DAs eschew all accountability and instead blame guns and faceless systemic racism for the carnage. They got the systemic racism part right but there’s nothing faceless about it: the faces (and the systemic racism) all belong to the Democratic Party — the only ones in control for generations — as always.
As for guns, it might be worthwhile to remind folks that gun control in this country owes its very existence to systemic racism…
So rather than deny the existence of systemic racism, perhaps it’s time to remind folks that systemically racist Democratic Party policies and shock troops have been confiscating the guns of law-abiding black people for the past two centuries (while only recently trying to extend the same courtesy to law-abiding, working-class whites).
Yet somehow the Democratic cities with the toughest gun laws always seem to be among the cities with the highest gun crime rates. Nevertheless, shameless Democratic Party elites of all colors remain true to their Jim Crow roots by methodically stripping law enforcement protections from the poorest urban neighborhoods while also stripping the black and brown Americans who live in them of their Second Amendment right to arm themselves in defense of their homes, families, and civil liberties. Ever-entitled and wholly immune from the consequences of their own systemic racism, the rainbow coalition of Democratic Party elites surround themselves with private security details, fund the Capitol Police with billions of tax dollars to protect themselves and the People’s House from Chewbacca Guy, and sleep easy at night in gated communities.
Rinse, wash and repeat as the numbers of black and brown people murdered by other black and brown people skyrocket in blue cities nationwide. Not that the Democratic Party slumlords of the Congressional Black Caucus or the corporate media race baiters and technomedia oligarchs care enough to rise up and act. Again, they wouldn’t have it any other way.
More recently, blue-state Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates continued to inflict the evil of systemic racism on urban communities of color — this time in the Carrollean name of anti-racist science. During Covid lockdowns in 2020, thousands of small businesses owned by people of color were declared non-essential and summarily shut down with no due process and little or no compensation, many never to re-open their doors. Concurrently and conveniently, however, more than 500 mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter riots raised tens of millions of dollars from mostly white Democratic Party donors and corporate elites — and deployed legions of over-educated and entitled white shock troops to terrorize and gut hundreds of black and brown businesses in the poorest urban neighborhoods…
As of mid-August, 2020, about the same time Mayor “Putz” de Blasio announced the gleeful reopening of Gotham with his racist “Key to NYC” vaccine mandate, only about 28% of blacks aged 18-44 were vaccinated — effectively hanging out the No Colored Allowed sign in every city restaurant and indoor entertainment venue for the first time anywhere since the end of Jim Crow back in the mid-1960s.
With shock troops and science-free mandates like these who needs the KKK and contoured sheets?
My dad, a party-line FDR/JFK Democrat, told me one evening way back in 1976 that the only difference between the Right and the Left as far as Jews are concerned is that the Right will kick the Jews in the teeth while the Left will use the Jews first and then kick them in the teeth. By the very next morning — forty-five years ago — it had already occurred to me that the same Right/Left dental dynamic might apply to other races and ethnicities as well. So I did some research at the library. Then I walked away from the Democratic Party.
And now — forty-five years later — it occurs to me that perhaps those of us who might deny the existence of systemic racism simply cannot bring ourselves to accept the unqualified success of Democratic Party efforts in recent decades to re-brand, justify and establish it as the default lingua franca in every major American institution — public and private alike. Credit where credit is due: for the party of systemic racism to re-brand themselves as the sworn enemies of systemic racism and — even more incredibly — as the true custodians of racial justice is downright Machiavellian in its brilliance, guile, and audacity.
Before you dismiss the above observation as hyperbole, consider this: Nowhere is the success of Democratic Party re-branding efforts more evident than in the sudden and seemingly harmless shift from equality to equity as the driving meme of institutional America. While the linguistic sleight of hand that hides and otherwise facilitates the near-total replacement of equality with equity in common discourse may seem innocent and insignificant enough, the difference between the two concepts couldn’t be more calculated or profound: Equality — as embraced and preached by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s — is about opportunity. Equity — as the 21st-century institutional application of Critical Race Theory — is about compelled redistribution of power and wealth.
Where equality demands and requires procedural fairness of the precise sort codified in the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution, the racial essentialism of equity demands the opposite: the obliteration of procedural fairness. Where equality assumes justice and justice demands equality, equity assumes and demands neither. Equity abandons equality and justice to the collective dystopian whims of a highly commercial and immensely profitable form of corporate frontier law better known these days as social justice. But social justice — like racial justice, enviro justice, transjustice or any other form of justice that requires a modifier — is in fact just the digital version of good old fashioned mob justice. All in, equity is the polar opposite of equality and the calling card of progressive fascism and totalitarianism.
Nevertheless, as an institutional currency and corporate dog whistle, equity has emerged as the most recent manifestation of Democratic Party systemic racism writ large: a perfectly viable extension of a reliable and historically proven means to an end. As with Democratic Party responses to all other items high on the elitist agenda of culture war issues — items like systemic racism, global warming, gender identity and Covid mandates — equity is designed as yet another Trojan Horse to deflect attention away from the real objective: the relentless prosecution of an undeclared yet already protracted class war against poor and middle class people of all colors worldwide. It ain’t about race, folks. And it ain’t about global warming, gender identity or vaccine mandates, either. It’s about class.
As the rightful heirs to the terrorist lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan, today’s Democratic Party is the elitist 21st-century successor to a 19th-century plantation mentality that remains vitally and dangerously intact. The same plantation mentality is invoked as needed without a hint of self-awareness by Democratic Party elites of all colors to justify modern Black Code policies more overtly racist and statistically lethal than anything ever dreamed up by notorious Democratic Party segregationists like Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, and Robert Byrd.
True, times have changed and southern trees no longer bear strange fruit. Nevertheless, the bloody harvest of systemic racism still persists in the housing projects and dilapidated row homes of inner cities full of black and brown people whose neighborhoods and lives — two hundred years later — are still manipulated and controlled almost entirely by Democratic Party plantation masters.
Unfortunately for working class people of all colors, the Democratic Party has a long institutional memory. And this time, the losers of the first Civil War — architects and defenders of slavery, Jim Crow, KKK lynchings, mass incarceration, 21st-century school segregation, broken black welfare families, open borders, black-on-black crime, gun control, Critical Race Theory, equity, and family planning policies that result in more black babies aborted than born each year in NYC — intend to win. Like their Confederate ancestors, today’s Democratic Party intends to keep black and brown people under the boot of systemic racism forever, even if it means tearing the nation apart once again — this time along class lines. They have no choice. Systemic racism is in their DNA. The Democratic Party cannot survive without it. It’s time for the rest of us to stand up and say so.
Good stuff. Some of the history of the white & black (& other colored) chess pieces.
Since that’s what the segmented masses are to the would be rulers, pieces, I think terms like “racism” are for consumption by the colored pieces being paid (your addiction thesis again) to consume themselves/others. Just narrative for those who read the lines, but not between them.
I knew a Northern Italian (descent) with the Southern Italian name Campana. Second generation, his parents landed in Detroit. Twenties-thirties-forties time frame. He told stories of the strange fruit that dangled from street lamps “up there” in those days.
My stepfather was also from Detroit. More stories.
My point (which includes derivation from personal experiences, “down south,” that I won’t go into) is that the frictions aren’t completely manufactured. For lack of a better term, there are “cultural” differences that churn at the margins.
And the stories told, & the stories I lived & could tell, resound honestly that the diversity ideal is a strength the same way the capitalism ideal is. Sounds good on paper, in academic halls & editorial cubicles, but is otherwise mostly MIA. Narrative & mythos.
And however wide or narrow those margins are they are as plate tectonic fault lines. Which the chess club organizers capitalize upon.
Another story. My family happened to be living in SoCal at the time of the Watts rioting. When the local police responded to query “what is acceptable self-defense, should it become necessary?” with the answer that amounted to use your non-dominant hand & tie the other behind your back, it was white flight to TX time. Because of, informed by, stepfather’s rough experiences in Detroit.
(TX was a different place, in the 60’s. Not different now. Because progressive progress has progressed.)
Public education. John Taylor Gatto is go to guy for that history, that intent, that progress. It has degraded all. Fools Prussian Where Angels Fear To Tread, call it.
Dims have always falsely claimed R's are the villains. In reality it’s the failed
policies of the Dim Party that have kept blacks down. Massive govt welfare
has decimated the black family. Opposition to school choice has kept them trapped in failing
schools. Politically correct policing has left black neighborhoods defenseless against violent
crime.