Whenever President Obama gets in trouble the leftists love to play the race card and accuse his enemies of hating him because he is black. Jimmy Carter, among others, is guilty of this, and other leftists regularly accuse Tea Party patriots of being racists. So let’s see whether this theory withstands logical scrutiny.
People say that racism is about “hate” and “bigotry.” These, however, are mere empty slogans. If you look at history, you can discern a central motive that generally explains racism. Here I will draw upon the theory of social biology, which seeks to explain human social structures, e.g. marriage, by reference to each organism’s drive to maximize the spread of its genetic material. A race is a collection of humans who evolved in roughly the same geographic area and are therefore related to one another more closely than to members of other races. Members of racial groups use racism to promote the survival of their DNA at the expense of other genetic blends.
If this theory of racism is correct, then the solution to racism is for humans to stop thinking like animals, who only care about the survival of their DNA, if that, and to start thinking like human beings, who care about individual happiness and fulfilling one’s potential as a reasoning mind. If people were to do this, then interracial marriage would become far more common, and 500 years from now everyone would be a member of the same global race, which would end racism for good.
Now let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the ideas in a person’s mind come from his or her thoughts and decisions and not from DNA. Then, if we concede that a “culture” consists not only of art, music, and food, but also (and most importantly) of ideas and concepts and the style of thinking that they embody, it will become evident that culture has no direct relationship to DNA. If that is so, then a race and a culture can be associated only by accident, and there is no causal relationship such that, for instance, black DNA causes black culture.
A racial culture is chosen by the members of a race, and it is not an expression of their DNA, although the culture that parents teach to their children can have a strong impact on the culture of the next generation. These observations underscore Thomas Sowell’s brilliant argument that members of oppressed racial minority groups might best be served by reforming their culture on the model of, say, Jewish culture, which has shown itself capable of overcoming oppression and achieving affluence.
So at last we come to the great fraud of racial leftism: the argument that if you oppose an idea that is thought to be implicit in, for instance, black culture, you are therefore a racist. From here all the modern-liberals need to do is argue that leftism and Marxism are intrinsically tied to black culture, and they can make an argument, quite logical within the context of their faulty premises, that everyone who opposes the Obama agenda is an anti-black racist. This is the trick that Obama, whom some regard as the Ace of Hearts, has up his sleeve. You can expect him to lay it on thick by accusing the Tea Party and Republicans of being white supremacists during the 2012 election campaign.
But as Ayn Rand said, “Check your premises.” Yes, there may be groups of bigoted whites in the deep South who vote Republican and also like white DNA more than black DNA (although even to suggest this is to engage in discriminatory stereotyping). Nobody knows how Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry really feels about blacks, although I am confident that Ron Paul is not a racist. But what in the world do white racists in the South have to do with economic theory? If you do not accept any causal link between racial DNA and cultural ideas, and if you reject the absurd and insulting notion that socialism favors dark-skinned people (see my essay on racism in Liberty, August 2010), then this racist argument is nonsense. Pull out the premises that form the foundation of the argument, and Obama’s house of cards collapses.
