There’s a rule of law that Americans of all races have long asked for, and thought they had. That rule is the one that outlaws racial discrimination.

First, consider where we are now as we approach two centuries since the Civil War and three generations since the first Civil Rights Act. We’ve elected a Black President and a Black Vice President, we currently have a stellar Hispanic Secretary of State, we’ve had 14 Black Senators and 183 Black members of the House (including many from states that were part of the Confederacy), and oddsmakers say a Black man is likely to be the next Speaker of the House.  

America has plenty of flaws that need fixing, but, given these facts, it’s hard to make a case that one of those flaws is systemic racism. Are there a few racist people in America? Of course, everywhere has that, and most places have a lot more of them than America does.

But is America a systemically racist society? No. America is probably the least-racist place on earth.

America’s world-leading progress wasn’t enough for an alliance of well-intentioned social engineers seeking to improve us and ill-intentioned fascists seeking to end us.

They decided that our color-blind society has too little color – too few Black people – in prestige universities, company board rooms, and status professions like law and medicine, because Black presence in those fields was less than their 13% presence in the population at large.  Consistent with the pre-conceived goal of improving us (or ending us), these do-gooders (and do-baders) attributed that shortfall to our racism.

They conveniently ignored the abundance of Blacks and the paucity of whites in lucrative sports such as basketball and football in our purportedly racist nation. When facts don’t fit the narrative, these people ignore the facts.

To “remedy” the perceived “problem” that America had racially discriminated against Blacks, the social engineers and fascists schemed to discriminate in favor of them. They embarked on a campaign to correct racial discrimination by . . . racially discriminating.  

They didn’t call it racial discrimination, of course. They used euphemisms like “affirmative action.” When “affirmative action” came to be recognized as racial discrimination, they rebranded it “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Now that “diversity, equity and inclusion” has likewise been recognized as racial discrimination, they are re-branding yet again.

Whatever their name, these programs were all based on the notion that Blacks should be favored in non-athletic competition that is ordinarily based on merit, in order to achieve a number of Blacks that is proportionate to their representation in society.

The degree of discrimination necessary to produce this outcome has been extreme, as shown by objective measures. The average test scores of people admitted to prestige colleges or to medical school are wildly different depending on the race of the applicant. As a matter of pure statistics, it is a simple and undeniable fact that the average Black physician would never have been admitted to med school if he’d been white.

This racial discrimination for the purpose of achieving proportionate representation was extended to every nook and cranny of American society (with that notable exception of sports). Businesses, clubs, fraternities, company board rooms, hospitals, law firms, colleges and every other group of people were pressured, coerced and often sued. They were forced to compromise merit in favor of proportionate racial representation.

Our elected leaders chose not to stand up to this. Democrats instead egged it on, because they benefited politically. Republicans just watched silently, because they were too damned cowardly to risk, ironically, being name-called “racist” for standing against racial discrimination.  

We now teeter over a racial abyss where people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin. As a society, we’ve almost succeeded in snatching a racist defeat from the jaws of a colorblind victory.

But a rescue is coming from the Supreme Court. Beginning a few years ago, the Court has re-affirmed the rules against racial discrimination in hiring, contracting and college admissions.

A case issued last week (though it was apparently decided many months ago – more about that later) built on this start. The topic was the drawing of Congressional Districts by race. I’ll discuss it in my next post.