| OPINION I’m a conservative who believes systemic racism is real By Michael Gerson The phrase “systemic racism,” like “climate change” and “gun control,” has been sucked into the vortex of the culture war. The emotional reaction to these words seems to preclude reasoned debate on their meaning. But a divisive concept can be clarifying. I know it has been for me: I don’t think it’s possible to be a conservative without believing that racism is, in part, structural. Most on the American right have dug into a very different position. They tend to view racism as an individual act of immorality. And they regard the progressive imputation of racism to be an attack on their character. In a free society, they reason, the responsibility for success and failure is largely personal. They’re proud of the productive life choices they’ve made and refuse to feel guilty for self-destructive life choices made by others. It’s an argument that sounds convincing—until it’s tested against the experience of our own lives. I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of a middle-class suburb in a Midwestern city. I went to a middle-class high school, with middle-class friends, eating middle-class fried bologna sandwiches. And for most of my upbringing, this seemed not only normal but normative. I assumed this was a typical American childhood. Only later did I begin to see that my normality was actually a social construction. By the time I was growing up in the 1970s, St. Louis no longer had legal segregation. But my suburb, my neighborhood and my private high school were all outcomes of White flight. The systems of policing, zoning and education I grew up with had been created to ensure one result: to keep certain communities safe, orderly and pale. I had little hint of this as a child. It seemed natural that I hardly ever met a person of color in a racially diverse city or seldom met a poor person in a place with some of the worst poverty in the country. All I knew was that I shouldn’t get lost in certain neighborhoods or invite Black people to the private pool where we were members. (My brother did once, and there was suddenly a problem with processing our membership card.) But none of this was neutral or normal. Systems had been carefully created to ensure I went to an all-White church, in an all-White neighborhood, while attending an all-White Christian school and shopping in allWhite stores. I now realize I grew up in one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Was this my fault? Not in the strictest sense. I didn’t create these systems. But I wish I had realized earlier that these systems had created me. This is what I mean by systemic racism. If, on my 13th birthday, all the country’s laws had been suddenly, perfectly and equally enforced, my community would still have had a massive hangover of history. The structures and attitudes shaped during decades and centuries of oppression would still have existed. Legal equality in theory does not mean a society is justly constituted. For me, part of being a conservative means taking history seriously. We do not, as Tom Paine foolishly claimed, “have it in our power to begin the world over again.” We live in an imperfect world we did not create and have duties that flow from our story. There is an important moral distinction between “guilt” and “responsibility.” It is not useful, and perhaps not fair, to say that most White people are guilty of creating social systems shaped by white supremacy. But they do have a responsibility as citizens, and as moral creatures, to seek a
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ICON | JULY/AUGUST 2021 | ICONDV.COM
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Lauren Boebert, lost in a cacophony of crazy By Dana Milbank Poor Lauren Boebert. The QAnon-admiring first-term Republican congresswoman from Colorado has tried everything to get noticed. Since she burst on the scene by tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s whereabouts during the Jan. 6 insurrection, she has attempted one stunt after another. To protest President Joe Biden’s immigration policy, she noisily unfurled a foil blanket and covered herself in it during Biden’s address to Congress. She announced at a town hall that she had “very good information” that a secret scandal would oust Democrats from power before 2022, a popular QAnon claim. Two hours after the Boulder shooter killed 10 people in her home state, she sent a fundraising email asking donors to tell “radical liberals” Pelosi and Biden “‘HELL NO’ to taking our guns.” But she has languished as a poor man’s Sarah Palin and a third-rate Josh Hawley, as others seize the spotlight with superior antics. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., another QAnon aficionado, inflamed the House with her antisemitic talk of Jewish “space lasers” and likening public health guidelines to the Holocaust. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., spoke at a confab of QAnon types where the violent overthrow of the U.S. government was contemplated. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., compared the Jan. 6 insurrection to a “normal tourist visit.” Boebert had to raise her game. And on Wednesday, she gave it her best shot. She assembled 10 colleagues in the House TV studio to announce her new resolution to censure Biden—a reprimand that a chamber of Congress has delivered only once in U.S. history, to Andrew Jackson—over Biden’s border policy. “The Biden regime has punched our Border Patrol agents in the face!” she shouted, after calling Vice President Kamala Harris “Cackling Kamala.” Not bad. But Boebert was immediately overshadowed by her colleagues, who put on a clinic in crazy talk. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., called Biden “a reckless lawbreaker” who “spits on the laws,” “prioritizes napping” and wants “to lead America to ruin.” Gohmert proposed that Biden “had no clue what was going on” with the border and “has some real mental issues that need to be evaluated.” And then there was Greene, who endorsed the “censor” resolution—but then one-upped Boebert. Biden “doesn’t need just censured, he needs impeached,” Greene said. Boebert, beaten, had no choice but to follow suit. “It’s a very light action to censure him,” she admitted. “This is actually worthy of impeachment, and that is what we should be doing right now.” Censure? Never mind. The event was on brand for Republicans. While the world-leading vaccine rollout in the United States and the sweeping covid relief have propelled the U.S. economy to faster growth than other developed countries, Republican lawmakers and the Fox News echo chamber have established a parallel universe in which the country is overrun by crime, illegal immigrants, killer coronavirus vaccines, critical race theory, cancel culture and defund the police. Some of these issues are real; Biden, responding to a substantial increase in violent crime over the past year, rolled out new measures Wednesday to address the problem. Others range from tendentious to outright fictitious. A few hours before Boebert’s event, House Republican leaders held a news conference in the same studio, declaring it “probable” that covid-19 came from a Wuhan lab and speculating that Democrats are being blackmailed by communist China. With such a cacophony of conspiracy theories, it’s understandably hard
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