The Problem With Institutional Racism

"One of the classic debates within black politics is the debate over the effect of institutional racism over the prospects for African American success. Something very interesting occured to me as I was reading Booker Rising's account of John McWhorter today.

That is that the politics of anti-racism engaged by Leftists encourage the culture of dysfunction by blackfolks below the middle class baseline.....Part of the failure of progressive black politics is that they encourage people who can't even hack the middle class basics to believe they can beat the system via some Black Power. It never worked, it never will work. NOI is proof. Upon reaching the mainstream, that's when boldness and vision can work, but only based upon honest and open business dealings and relationships."

He continues: "Academics like [Michael Eric] Dyson, coming as they do from Socialist backgrounds, believe they can identify a structural racism *that can be structurally defeated* through the defunding of 'racist institutions'. But America is not undergirded by racist institutions, America is chock full of public institutions and market institutions that are corrupted and abused by individual racists. Every racist act perpetrated by racist individuals empowered by an institution do not prove that institution racist. It only proves that America is full of racists that we are unable to keep out of the mainstream. It is the unwillingness of Leftists to acknowledge that fact that keeps many blacks distrustful of the mainstream public and market institutions into which they must integrate and assimilate in order to make the American middle class baseline. Instead, they irrationally hate and fear the very institutions upon which their improvement depends."

And more: "I think instead we can say that the elimination of Jim Crow was the penultimate battle with the final battle played on social grounds - getting our entire culture past the interpersonal barriers of a Jim Crow society. The first priority of White Supremacy has always been to deny others any 'defiling' of the 'pure' white race. That's not a problem any longer. Opposition to Affirmative Action comes almost exclusively from the moral injunction against racial preferences. There can be no doubt that there are plenty of racists who can't stand the idea of race mixing on college campuses as the basis of their opposition, good luck trying to get them to say so in public. They cannot because the American mainstream doesn't tolerate such ideas. Not even when they're implied in disrespectful commentary. Virtually nobody stands on the principle of racial segregation. So where are the racist institutions? Maybe they're all in our heads."

~Michael David Cobb Bowen is the political & cultural blogger 'Cobb'. He writes from the perspective of a moderate conservative Republican representing the 'Old School' of African American culture and values. In his 15 year career of writing as a poet and essayist he has been called the Ralph Ellison of his generation.