August 30, 2023
This week marks the sixtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s eloquent “I Have a Dream” speech in which he envisioned a day when his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Time and again, he spoke of an America where blacks and whites would live together in peace and harmony.
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He referred to “the promises of Democracy.” There were no blacks in the 9th Congress that outlawed American participation in the slave trade in 1808, and there were no blacks in the 38th Congress that approved the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery. The 88th Congress that passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act included but five black legislators—less than 1% of its membership.
Whites contributed the civil rights struggle’s success in many other ways. Roughly 90% of the Union soldiers who died during the Civil War were white. Most of the civil rights protesters murdered by the Klan following the 1965 Selma marches were white. A 2014 poll on the effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act found that 80% of Americans believed it had a positive effect, while only 1% thought the effect was negative.
All Americans should embrace Dr. King’s inspiring vision without respect to their color or creed. Sadly, today that dream conflicts with a very different and blatantly racist narrative designed to persuade the nation that 21st-century whites are inherently evil and contemporary blacks are victims. The remedy, we are told, must be a reverse racism in which blacks are given special privileges (and perhaps vast sums of money) as compensation for the evils of American slavery and the tragic racist policies that followed.
Image: Martin Luther King by the National Park Service. CC BY 2.0.
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Certainly, every American today should recognize the evils of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws. But most of the perpetrators and their victims died generations ago, and punishing children (much less great-great-great-grandchildren) for the crimes of their ancestors is unacceptable. “Corruption of blood” is expressly prohibited by our Constitution.
The average black American today was born decades after the last Jim Crow laws were repealed, and government-mandated “Affirmative Action” programs had been around for more than 25 years. But even were that not the reality, racial discrimination is wrong on numerous levels. It divides our nation; punishes individuals for the “crime” of having a similar skin tone to strangers who’ve committed wrongful acts, sometimes centuries before they were born; encourages rational actors to draw logical (but erroneous) conclusions that blacks are intellectually inferior; and ignores the reality that black Africans played a greater role than white Americans in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Arbitrarily punishing white students or job seekers today because they share a skin color with historic wrongdoers is immoral. I am unaware of a single black American who has volunteered to stand trial before the International Criminal Court in Rome for the heinous war crimes of black Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, whose “Lord’s Resistance Army” is thought responsible for at least 100,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of displacements. To suggest that sharing a similar skin tone establishes moral or legal culpability is as monstrous as it is racist.
There have been occasional reports of tribal councils in Africa and South Asia resolving intertribal rapes by directing that the brother of the victim be permitted to rape the sister of the offender. This may well deter intertribal vigilantism, but would any serious American call it justice?
America is a nation of individuals, not tribes, and anyone who regrets that should contemplate the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsi in about 100 days. As Justice Thomas noted in his brilliant concurrence in the recent Harvard Affirmative Action case: “[T]he Constitution continues to embody a simple truth: Two discriminatory wrongs cannot make a right.”
Nor, as noted, can we blame only whites for American slavery. Virtually every African brought to America in chains was enslaved by other Africans and sold to European ship captains at slave markets near West African ports. Slavery existed in Africa centuries before the Atlantic slave trade began and continues to be practiced in parts of Africa today. Anyone who tries to blame 21st-century whites for slavery is uninformed about the essential role blacks played in bringing slavery to America—or perhaps hopes others will be unaware of this reality so as to seek special privileges for themselves.
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Consider affirmative action. If it is known a university demands a lesser degree of competence by students of a preferred race, will their diplomas contain an “invisible asterisk” alerting people that the recipient might be less talented than classmates?
This is particularly unfair to members of the favored race who did not require special treatment and excelled at the school. I have in mind a very talented black woman who earned the only A+ I gave in more than three decades of teaching at the University of Virginia Law School. I fear that, because of her dark skin color, her diploma may be undervalued by some.
The fact that blacks with bachelor’s degrees earn significantly less than white counterparts with identical degrees supports the logical conclusion affirmative action has led employers to view black credentials with suspicion. A 1998 study by the liberal Brookings Institution noted that “when education was measured by years of school completed, blacks earned 19 percent less than comparably educated whites.” When employers were able to look at actual accomplishments, though, the results flipped. “[W]hen word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetical reasoning, and mathematical knowledge became the yardstick, the results were reversed. Black men earned 9 percent more than white men with the same education—that is, the same performance on basic tests.”
In denouncing slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson asked: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?” Replacing “unalienable rights” with the whims of a democratic majority is hardly prudent if our goal is to protect minority rights. This is particularly true when the minority represents less than 15% of the vote.
As a group—despite continuing inequities—American blacks have made considerable progress in some important areas. For example, in terms of education (which is critically important for success), 84.2% of blacks over 25 have a high school diploma (versus 89% of whites). Black Americans’ literacy rate in 2019 was 87.1% (versus 90,1% for whites). In 2020—the year the U.S. Census reported blacks constituted 13.6% of the population—blacks made up “just under 14%” of U.S. college students. In 2018, 89% of black teenagers owned a computer (compared to 90% of white teens), and 94% of each group at least had access to a smartphone at home.
One of the greatest myths in this entire debate is the idea that white Americans are economically better off than “people of color” or others who have faced historic discrimination. The Census Bureau reports the U.S. median household family income in 2018 was $61,937. For non-Hispanic whites, it was $67,937.
Groups of Americans with higher median family incomes than whites include (of 16 listed): Indians, Filipinos, Taiwanese, Indonesians, Pakistani, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. In other words, American whites earn more than 8 categories of non-white Asian-Americans and less than 8 categories. That hardly supports the “white privilege” mantra.
Far more importantly, the evidence is overwhelming that most black Americans today are far better off than would likely be the case had their ancestors not been brought here in chains. On almost every metric—from infant mortality and life expectancy to access to potable water and electricity, income (including income inequality), crime, disease, medical care, government corruption, happiness, and much more—American blacks are measurably better off.
But they will do even better if all Americans can unite behind Dr. King’s beautiful dream that no American should ever again be judged “by the color of their skin.”
Professor Turner holds both professional and academic doctorates from the University of Virginia, where, before his 2020 retirement, he taught for more than three decades.
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