Progressives Have Redefined Racism

Cory Booker levied the charge against Joe Biden because, as a young Democrat in Congress, he had gotten along with the segregationists who ran his party. Apparently Booker believes that only a racist would have entered politics as a Democrat in the 1960s.

Kamala Harris doubled down on Booker’s charges, calling out Biden not merely for his associations but for his opposition to forced busing back in the 1970s. Apparently Harris’s two successful, professional parents had suffered such discrimination in the racist town of Berkeley, California, that they’d been unable to find housing in a decent school district.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the charge to challenge Nancy Pelosi’s treatment of her “Squad.” Apparently there are insidious racial overtones to Pelosi’s preference for Democrat hatemongers with seniority — like Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters — to the hatemongering newcomers.

Every Democrat in the House disgraced their institution with a vote declaring several of President Trump’s tweets racist. Apparently suggesting that Progressive Democrat Congresswomen representing relatively poor, mismanaged, high-crime districts “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done,” brands them as something other than Americans.

…and that’s just within the past month!

These allegations are not going to stop. The Democrats have chosen racism as the central theme of their 2020 campaign. In the increasingly unlikely event that they nominate a “straight white male,” they’ll have to carve an exception. But the activist Progressive base and the equally Progressive media don’t want to see that happen, so they’re creating a narrative to make it unworkable.

Which is why it’s absolutely critical to focus on a central — if decidedly unsexy — question: What is the definition of “racism?”

The importance of this question cannot be overstated. It is the key to demolishing the Democrats’ ongoing defamation of America.

The entire false narrative rests upon a sleight-of-hand, or in technical terms, a deconstruction. Progressives have wrested the term “racism” from its historic, accepted, proper meaning, and attached it to an entirely different phenomenon that — by sheer coincidence — corresponds to everything progressivism happens to oppose. They then take all of the negative baggage associated with actual racism and use it to tar their unsuspecting victims who are merely insufficiently Progressive.

It’s a brutal strategy that Progressive Democrats have been honing for years. They’re now on the verge of steamrolling America with it. And only a recourse to definitions can stop them.

Racism, properly understood, begins by dividing humanity into distinct categories. It then attributes different characteristics, standards, rights, and/or responsibilities to each category. Finally, it assigns each person to a category, ceases treating them as individuals, and sees them only as representatives of their assigned category — independent of their own behavior, circumstances, or achievements.

That’s not, however, what today’s Progressive Democrats mean when they accuse someone of racism. What they’re talking about is something they call “structural racism,” which the prestigious, Progressive, Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change Racial Equity Project has helpfully defined:

Structural racism is “a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time… Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist.”

In other words, the “racism” Progressives fight is baked into existence, independent of the racist attitudes, utterances, or behavior of any individual, institution, organization, corporation, or government. Anything that preserves any part of history or tradition is “structurally racist.”

When Progressives call Biden, Pelosi, or Trump “racist,” they don’t mean the term as normal people understand it. What they mean is simply that in any clash between those with the “privileges of whiteness” and those possessing the “disadvantages of color,” justice screams that the “person of color” must prevail. Otherwise, society’s “racist structures” remain intact.

Progressives have redefined racism away from the truly evil practice of depersonalizing individuals and discriminating among groups because that’s the entire basis of Progressive identity politics. In other words, it is Progressives and Democrats who manifest racism far more regularly than those they accuse. Their racism will only accelerate as the campaign unfolds.

Definition is the key to defense. Remember: The next time you hear a Democrat allege racism, don’t challenge them with “How is that racist?” Go straight to their weakest point. Insist that they define racism. Do it once, and they’ll get angry. Do it enough, and we will win. Americans rightly despise real racism. All we need to do to win is to help them see through the Democrats’ deconstruction, redefinition, and lies.

Bruce Abramson is the President of Informationism, Inc., a Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, and the founder of the American Restoration Institute. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.