Personal prejudice: Not the same as institutional discrimination

In the reaction to the killing of George Floyd, plenty of people haven’t taken the time to parse through critical differences between personal prejudice (and a brute) and institutional racism. From columnists to politicians to corporations, the former is assumed synonymous with the latter.

That conflation does a tremendous disservice to those who lived through actual institutional racism—banned lunch counters and bus and theatre seats; restrictions on Jews at Ivy League colleges; neighbourhoods off-limits to blacks and much more—and who successfully fought those practices to extinction.

The Minnesota ex-cop who killed George Floyd was a brute, or a racist, or both. But individual acts in 2020 do not change the fact that institutional discriminatory practices were outlawed starting in the 1950s and 1960s and that reverse discrimination in fact began in the 1960s in the United States and in the 1980s in Canada. I cover such developments in The Victim Cult. Here is an excerpt dealing with the experience of economist Shelby Steele. For those who don’t know who he is, or can’t look past skin colour and “privilege” assertions, here’s a relevant fact: Steele is black and grew up in segregationist Chicago.

Personal prejudice: Not the same as institutional discrimination

The following is an excerpt from The Victim Cult: How the culture of blame hurts everyone and wrecks civilizations, by Mark Milke.

In all this, the central argument is not that all bigotry has been banished from all human hearts but that the dragon is no longer fed by the state in either the United States or Canada. Since the 1950s, successive governments instead slashed at the dragon’s tendons and arteries by enacting policies that forswore race as a basis for government or public discrimination.

In 1951 in Ontario, discrimination in the workplace or in the buying or selling of property based on religion or race was outlawed under the Fair Employment Practices Act. That was followed up by the Female Employees Fair Remuneration Act that ensured equal pay for equal work for women was protected; the 1954 Fair Accommodation Practices Act also prevented discrimination in lodging and other services based on race or religion.

To be sure, some present-day policies are illiberal and imperfect now in their own right: preferential race and gender hiring preferences, for example. But those are anyway the opposite of anti-minority racism and prejudice given that their very purpose, right or wrong, is to ameliorate the effects of past discrimination upon minorities.

The argument against the chronic victim-cult assumptions found in race and ethnic issues is thus what Shelby Steele points out: It is not that America (or Canada, for Canadians) is perfect. Instead, what a country owes its citizens are not guaranteed outcomes but instead liberalism and a free society.

Steele thinks it impossible for the state to guarantee a nation free of all bigotry, but the state can certainly be “free of all illegal discrimination.” That has now been delivered with legal reforms in the 1950s and 1960s. For Steele, the problem is guilt over the past, which prevents a clear view of how far America advanced. Steele regularly encounters this notion that the United States is “structurally” racist and possessed of hidden discrimination.

Steele was exposed to just such a view at the Aspen Institute mid-decade. There, Steele argued in a speech that in the 1950s and 1960s, equality of opportunity for the individual was the needed critical advance, and it had been, and that modern race preferences were illiberal. For good measure, Steele opined that the post-1960s proliferation of identity politics had created a grievance culture just as America was “at last beginning to free up minorities as individual citizens who could pursue their own happiness to the limits of their abilities.”

One day later, the moderator approached him along with a fidgety, young white man who wanted to speak to the audience about Steele’s speech the previous day. In the spirit of debate, Steele said “yes,” whereupon the young graduate student proceeded to warn the audience against Steele’s “false consolation,” that “racism, discrimination and inequality were still alive—still great barriers to black advancement.”

A young white college student with little experience thus warned the audience against a black professional who faced severe racism and discrimination decades before. Steele’s response: “My first reaction to people like this is always the same: Where were you when I needed you? I had grown up in the rigid segregation of 1950s Chicago, where my life had been entirely circumscribed by white racism. Residential segregation was nearly absolute. My elementary school triggered the first desegregation lawsuit in the North. My family was afraid to cross the threshold of any restaurant until I was twenty years old.”

For Steele, the young man he encountered that day offered no serious ideas or a coherent rebuttal but instead attempted to make Steele “an untouchable—someone from a dark realm of ideas who was at once seductive and evil.” Except the young man was a poseur, “pretending to the heroism of those ‘good whites’ who back in the civil rights era, had actually ‘spoken truth to power’—whites who had risked their careers, their families, their standing in their communities and even their lives.”

In contrast, here was a young white in Aspen who was a moral redundancy, “a man protesting racism to people for whom it was already anathema,” wrote Steele—and, one might add, saying such things in the very privileged surroundings of a conference resort.

Mark MilkeJune 6, 2020