Only five years ago, white America still held the comfortable belief that racism, the grimmest specter of our nation’s past, was finally taking its last feeble gasps. Since then, however, that specter has come roaring back in a barrage of napalm-grade controversies, from Trayvon Martin to Yale University, that have punched gaping holes in our cheerful narratives.
Racial grievance is boiling in America, and the current battlefields are colleges where protesters march in unison to the beat of the leftist identity politics of victimhood. College campuses across the nation are held in sway by marginalized mobs of students aggressively patrolling “safe spaces,” excoriating microaggressions, and in myriad other ways demanding that their marginalization be institutionally recognized.
As these events unfold, conservative commentators are shaking their heads with bewilderment. How have the principles of old-guard liberalism, of the equality of man, of natural rights including freedom of assembly, speech, and the press — the same freedoms, indeed, which have historically helped marginalized populations make their voices heard — fallen so far out of favor? And how have these Orwellian paradoxes, like protesters asserting their right to be heard by screaming down dissenters, taken root so strongly in their place?
Conservatives may indict left-wing radicals for orchestrating these disastrous insurgencies, but they themselves are not free of blame. By repeatedly failing to hear the concerns of America’s disenfranchised populations, conservatives have ensured that those populations will ignore their philosophy. By choosing to simply deny the existence of systemic or societal racial bias in America, we have allowed the political left a monopoly on solutions to those problems.
If there’s a silver lining to the harrowing tales of prejudice that have repeatedly bubbled to the surface over the past few years, it’s that many white Americans are starting to notice what African Americans never really forgot: that there’s more to racism than lynch mobs or dismissive stereotypes. We’ve caught onto the simple, unfortunate fact that blacks in America face obstacles, from unconscious bias to generational poverty, which most white people, whose opportunities come much more freely, can hardly begin to comprehend.
Not everyone got the memo, however. Calamitously, the political right has simply opted not to acknowledge this uncomfortable truth. According to a recent YouGov poll, 93 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Independents (to say nothing of 96 percent of African Americans) view racism as at least a “somewhat serious” problem today; only 57 percent of Republicans agree.
Why should we be surprised that the political left maintains an overwhelming majority of black support? The right has entirely refused to acknowledge their most basic concerns.
It is for precisely this reason that racial politics have swollen to such grotesque proportions in America: Conservatives, content to deny the problem, have allowed liberals to run unchecked writing the prescription for the solution. Who could be shocked that the solution thus contains all the tired old liberal solutions: more administrative experts, fewer permitted opinions, and human rights derived through the dispensation of a benevolent state?
This must change. As a philosophy that prizes individual attainment and stresses each American’s right to integrate himself into the country’s social structures, conservatism has much to offer a disadvantaged black population. But that potential will go untapped so long as conservatives disdain the unique struggles of black Americans.
It’s up to conservatives now to provide an alternate solution to systemic prejudice, one with more to offer than endless acknowledgements of victimhood. Only through the principles of liberty will the disadvantaged be able to transcend that victimhood and thus outpunch prejudice themselves. By finally acknowledging their concerns, conservatives may find their solution both to the country’s racism and to its liberalism run wild.