Democrats Make Race the Measure of All Things

Written by Robert Knight

Did you ever think you would see the day when Jewish students on elite college campuses were afraid to attend classes?

Pro-Hamas mobs have taken over. They have built tent cities and made it clear that Jews and anyone supporting Israel is an enemy.

At Columbia University, Israel-born Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at the business school, was told that his keycard was deactivated after he spoke at a pro-Israel rally.

Racial and ethnic bigotry, which had been on the decline for decades, have reemerged like Dracula rising from his coffin. Race is being made the central factor in any human interactions. This is no accident.

Democrats have long been racially obsessed. The party of the Ku Klux Klan, they created Jim Crow laws and defended them right up to the 1960s, when a greater percentage of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

This past week, a federal judge struck down a North Carolina law barring convicted felons from voting if they had not had their citizenship privileges restored.

U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs, an Obama appointee, ruled that the 147-year-old statute discriminates against minorities, who tend to be overrepresented in prison populations. Getting more felons to vote is a big cause for Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration sued the Sheetz gas station and convenience store chain this past week, charging it with discrimination because the company conducts criminal background checks on job applicants. Seriously.

In one of those oddly timed sequences, the lawsuit was filed a day after President Biden made a campaign stop at a Sheetz store in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, wearing his aviator glasses and buying snacks for workers. I wonder if he even knew his legal beagles were about to take a chomp out of Sheetz.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney Debra M. Lawrence wrote that Sheetz’s background checks “cause a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications.”

There is no indication that the company discriminates against Blacks who have no criminal record.

Like other businesses, Sheetz wants to minimize theft and protect its customers and employees from criminals.

The company, which operates 723 stores in the mid-Atlantic states, including 305 in Pennsylvania, is being accused of racism for wanting honest employees regardless of race.

Ms. Lawrence was unyielding, however, saying that “even when such necessity is proven, the practice remains unlawful if there is an alternative practice available that is comparably effective.”

And that alternative is what, exactly? Looking the other way?

In California, the Democratic-dominated state Senate Judiciary Committee created a new agency this month to establish a Genealogy Office to determine eligibility for slavery reparations. The committee could probably get some tips on calculating racial percentages from the defunct racist apartheid regime in South Africa.

A Democratic-run California reparations task force last year proposed paying each recipient up to $1.2 million, which would cost state taxpayers as much as $800 billion — more than twice the state’s annual budget. Not to be outdone, a San Francisco racial reparations group recommended payments of up to $5 million each.

This is all pretty rich given that California was never a slave state.

Forget the high-minded rhetoric. These policies are evil. They deliberately foment resentment, envy and animus instead of healing.

Likewise, diversity, equity and inclusion sessions are designed to divide. They put everybody into brightly delineated, self-conscious identity groups instead of reminding us that we are all humans made in the image of God. Any problems we have are always caused by someone else.

“We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did,” wrote Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell, who is Black.

Over the years, Mr. Sowell has written extensively about the origins of unequal outcomes and has noted the destructiveness caused by lowered expectations for minorities. The Democrats’ Great Society effectively stopped progress for poor Blacks and rendered them subservient to a welfare system that rewards unwed motherhood.

The deliberate damage done to the married, mother-and-father Black family has been astronomically successful in creating generational dependency and a reliable voting bloc for Democrats. At least until now.

There are signs that it is cracking.

Democrats continue to stoke the victim mentality with anti-White rhetoric (see President Biden’s speeches), false histories like The New York Times’ 1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and, more recently, the flood of antisemitic propaganda on campuses.

The quest for absolute equality in all things matches the Democrats’ zealous campaign to wreck America’s fossil fuel and car industries in pursuit of zero carbon emissions. Both goals are impossible, and both generate massive government coercion.

The key to minority advancement is not more social programs but a renewed societal commitment to the formation and preservation of stable families, Mr. Sowell wrote.

“Children born into families that raise them with love and with care to see that they acquire knowledge, values and discipline that will make them valuable members of society have far more chances of economic and other success in adulthood than children raised in families that lack these qualities,” he wrote.

Perhaps this is why Democrats are terrified by recent surveys showing that Hispanics, Blacks and other minorities are jumping ship.

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.