Following Nikki Haley, Tim Scott argues that America is not a racist country. It would be easy to dismiss his comments as an opportunistic effort by “Uncle Tim” to suck up to his party’s base for self-interested reasons. It may even be true. However, let’s evaluate his opinion on its merits and see where it goes.
I will start with three propositions on which all parties to the debate should be able to agree:
- Black people were enslaved prior to 1863 and subjected to ferocious and wide-ranging legal discrimination until the middle 1960s.
- There are no government regulations anywhere in the country today which facially discriminate against black people.
- By any indicator you care to name–wealth, unemployment, incarceration, education, drug use, and violent deaths, just to name a few–black people are significantly worse off than white people today.
The obvious question to ask a member of the GOP, such as Scott, is why #3 is the case. For a Democrat, the answer is easy: it is the lingering effects of #1, in addition to some ongoing racism today. That argument is both logical and factually plausible. Some Republicans might privately think that the correct answer is that “black people are worse off because they are inherently inferior,” but, in spite of their frequent harangues about PC, they know they cannot say such a thing in public. The Democratic response is also unacceptable, because it makes the case for affirmative action. The GOP member is consequently driven to take the position that decades of poor social policy driven by the Democrats have caused the problem. If you could just take the hammock of dependency away and force black people to stand on their feet without assistance, the inequality problem would disappear.
This is the Paul Ryan argument. It has no basis in logic or experience. The American safety net (at least pre-Biden) is about as far from a comfortable hammock as you can get, and the GOP has already had numerous opportunities to implement its position over the past several decades. Was there any improvement? None that I can see.
The bottom line is that the overwhelming evidence indicates that there is still plenty of as-applied racism in this country, and that the vestiges of hundreds of years of discrimination cannot be disposed of quickly. You don’t have to be woke to see that.