Yes, Fight Anti-White Racism

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, April 03, 2024

 

Is there anything more poisonous or ridiculous than insisting that corporations and the government treat people fairly regardless of race?

 

Apparently not. An Axios report on the Trump team’s intention to use civil-rights laws to target DEI policies discriminating against whites has occasioned sneering and denunciations.

 

(By the way, that this is a priority for Trump isn’t exactly a secret — he’s spelled it out quite plainly.)

 

Philip Bump at the Washington Post snarked, as the headline on his column puts it, “Trump aims to be a fearless warrior for White advantage.”

 

The New Republic commented, sarcastically, “If Donald Trump is elected to a second term in November, his allies plan to end this country’s long-standing oppression of a major marginalized group in America: white people.”

 

MSNBC warned, “Trumpism is increasingly organized around the reactionary principle that white Americans are not just overlooked, but are victims because of their race. This is a path to unraveling multicultural democracy.”

 

Much of the commentary reflects the contradictory argument that anti-white racism isn’t really a thing, yet, at the same time, is absolutely essential to racial progress. The same twisted reasoning was often used when the CRT controversy was at its height; critical race theory was either a right-wing myth or foundational to the truthful teaching of America’s past, or somehow both.

 

There should be a long German word for this rhetorical phenomenon.

 

Regardless, it is a matter of fact that anti-white discriminatory policies are very real. It is axiomatic that in the context of zero-sum hiring, admissions, and contracting decisions, favoring one group will disadvantage another.

 

This has been well established regarding affirmative-action policies at colleges — it’s much harder for white (or Asian) applicants to get into competitive schools than it is for members of favored minority groups with similar test scores and academic records.

 

Progressives might believe that this is cosmic justice somehow, that whites deserve whatever they get after having discriminated against other groups for so long, or that, as Philip Bump would have it, not getting discriminated against constitutes “White advantage.” But individuals aren’t racial symbols and don’t deserve to be treated as such. A conscientious white college applicant, who has done everything right and never harmed anyone, shouldn’t be punished for his or her race.

 

Why are the iniquities of the old Jim Crow regime being taken out on white applicants — who never voted for Lester Maddox and probably never even heard of him — for assistant-vice-president jobs at major banks and other corporations?

 

How does this make any sense? It is wrong and unfair, and, more to the point, against the law.

 

The U.S. Constitution is race neutral, and so are the civil-rights laws enacted after the Civil War and in the 1960s. As such — even if they have been distorted for malignant ends — they are potentially a powerful weapon against the system of racial preferences that has become so pervasive in American life in recent decades.

 

We saw that in the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision last year. (It never seems to make an impression on any progressives that the Supreme Court has found that affirmative action as it’s been practiced for decades is unconstitutional.) And, just last month, we saw it in the ruling against the Minority Business Development Agency by U.S. district court judge Mark Pittman in Texas.

 

Corporations that are setting hiring targets by race and gender face massive exposure. They haven’t had to worry about it much to this point. The plaintiffs’ bar, out of political cowardice, won’t touch this issue. On top of that, it’s hard even to find plaintiffs; becoming known as the white person who was chiseled out of a job and sued over it is not the best career move in corporate America.

 

This is why an ideologically driven group like Stephen Miller’s America First Legal has had to pick up the baton, with some success.

 

But if a Trump Justice Department decides to make an example of a couple of high-profile corporations engaged in these discriminatory practices, the regime of preferences may well crumble quickly.

 

Until recently, the incentives have been all the other way — to adopt the fashionable attitudes, spout the familiar DEI lines, empower the apparatchiks of HR, and not risk the ire of elite opinion by taking a different path.

 

Now, there are signs that DEI in corporate America is cresting, or at least becoming less blatant, under pressure from the likes of America First Legal and the logic of the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision.

 

If a concerted effort by a Trump Justice Department (and EEOC) pushes these types of policies in business and government into the dustbin, the Left will firmly plant both feet on one side of its current straddle — and say it’s a travesty that anti-white discrimination no longer exists.