Institutional Racism Explained

Stokely Carmichael

2,468 words

To understand the term “institutional racism” as a political device, one needs to distinguish its natural from its anti-racist meaning. For most people it denotes pervasive racial discrimination in an institution, but in its anti-racist meaning it denotes the opposite: namely, an institution’s practice of treating all the same without regard to race. How can this be?

The term originated, apparently, with the Black Power advocate Stokeley Carmichael in the 1960s, as a way of attacking institutions that placed black people in less enviable positions than whites, such as schools, which black children left with fewer qualifications, and the police, who arrested young black men at a higher rate. But given differences between the races, this is just what you would expect of institutions that afforded everyone equal treatment. Since black children tend to be less bright and hard-working than white children, under a fair system they will pass fewer exams. Since young black men are more inclined to crime, they will be arrested at a higher rate. But it was this connection between equal treatment and black outcomes that anti-racists identified as “institutional racism.” What they opposed was essentially equal treatment. They instead wanted pro-black discrimination, and enough of it to put black people in the same position as whites no matter how poorly they performed.

Stokeley Carmichael and the anti-racists who came after him therefore played a simple word trick, attaching a bad-sounding term to something they opposed, intending to make others oppose it, too. They succeeded. Most people, with their natural assumption about the meaning of the bad-sounding term, thought that when an institution was accused of institutional racism, it was being accused of racial discrimination, little realizing that it was being accused of failing to discriminate. When white people rallied behind anti-racist calls for institutional racism to be overcome, thinking that they were calling for equal treatment, they were in fact calling for equal treatment to be overcome. Unwittingly, they demanded pro-black discrimination, which, since this amounts to anti-white discrimination, meant that they were demanding discrimination against themselves.

In the 1980s the accusation of institutional racism became a standard item in the anti-racist armory, and anti-racists found that another use of the word “racist” could help them make the accusation stick. This other use came from the fact that referring to racial differences was by this time taboo. Unless one professed to believe in essential racial equality, one was a “racist.” This meant that if an institution accused of institutional racism took the term in its natural sense and found the accusation unjust because it did not discriminate by race, it could not defend itself by pointing to the actual explanation. It had to accept the blame and adopt the anti-racist “remedy” of pro-black discrimination. Many institutions did this quite willingly, for under the growing influence of anti-racism they were already losing their grip on the value of equal treatment and starting to wonder whether it might not be their fault after all if the races did not come out of them in the same positions.

And so institutions started surreptitiously treating people differently by race. Schools started artificially boosting black children’s test scores, and the police, certainly in Britain, started turning a blind eye to black crime. Equal treatment was out of vogue. More important was trying to make it look as if the races were the same.

In Britain a watershed came in 1999 with the much-vaunted publication of an official report by Sir William Macpherson, which did as anti-racists wished by defining “institutional racism” so that it could be found in any institution at any time, implicitly permitting unlimited pro-black discrimination as a counter-measure.[1] Every institution from the National Health Service to the church, universities, the police, and the judiciary instantly and dramatically increased the degree of its racial discrimination, putting an end for good and all to equal treatment, which Macpherson had identified as the “corrosive disease” of institutional racism. Thus the extent of real institutional racism was vastly increased in the guise of the anti-racist conception of it being driven out. Britain’s institutions fell over themselves to abolish equal treatment and institutionalize racial discrimination in the name of eradicating institutional racism, able to imagine that they were curing society of a terrible disease.

Of course, in America pro-black discrimination had been institutionalized decades earlier as “affirmative action,” but even then it was not new. According to James Burnham, already in the 1920s it was customary for black students at New York University to be marked two grades higher than whites for a given level of work.[2] White people’s urge to favor black people at their own expense runs deep.

Since 1999 Britain has only become more institutionally racist, as it continues to do each year. Its institutions constantly increase the degree of their pro-black discrimination, usually in the name of “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equality” or “equity” or so that they will “reflect the communities they serve.” These rationales are just as bogus as the idea that we must combat “institutional racism,” or the statement that black people need special treatment to make up for the disadvantages they have supposedly inherited from the past. We have still not heard a coherent case for why diversity or inclusion should be valued, whatever these words are supposed to mean exactly, or for saying that racial equality of circumstance would be good. Nor has it ever been explained why an organization should reflect the demography of its surrounding population, or how having a distant ancestor who was a slave could stop one passing an exam.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.

Institutions ignore their stated goals. If they say that they seek proportional racial representation and achieve it, they still press on to employ fewer and fewer whites. Or they may arbitrarily set a goal out of all racial proportion. In 2022 His Majesty’s Treasury announced that it intended to increase the number of its black employees until they comprised 6% of the total. Nowhere near 6% of Britain’s population is black.[3]

And so the juggernaut of anti-white “diversity” and white exclusion rolls on. In 2021, as yet another case of alleged misconduct by a senior black police officer was being heard, the Home Secretary announced yet another plan to push black police officers into senior roles.[4] “We know we have so much more to do,” she said, not adding “to replace whites in the police by blacks.”[5] She also wanted to see more non-whites in the government, of whom there were already plenty, including herself.[6] At one point in 2022, under Boris Johnson non-whites occupied the following offices of state: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Attorney General, Health Secretary, Education Secretary, and Business Secretary, as well as Home Secretary.[7] Much the same institutional racism is seen in Britain’s government today, as led by our Indian Prime Minister.

In three more examples of institutional racism, also describable as institutional idiocy, in 2021 a woman in her twenties was given an important role in a National Health Service Trust after claiming to have a degree in molecular biology and experience of running a national charity. Because she was black, the employer failed to check her references, which she had invented.[8] In the same year, a Nigerian calling himself a professor was given an honorary position by Oxford University, which again failed to check his credentials. He then told Cambridge University that he was a Professor at Oxford, upon which Cambridge gave him an honorary position as well. It took Oxford 18 months to realize that he was a fraud without even a degree.[9] In 2023 Cambridge made a handicapped young black man, who had only started talking at the age of 11 and who was illiterate until 18, and can still hardly write a grammatical sentence, a professor.[10]

In America we see the effects of past institutional racism in such below-par academics as the law professors Patricia Williams and Kimberlé Crenshaw, as well as, it seems, in just about anyone who teaches in an African Studies department. These people are more active politically than academically, and are often rather unpleasant. Leaving aside the vicious statements of Patricia Williams and Kimberlé Crenshaw, consider Leonard Jeffries, who in 1986 as head of Afro-American Studies at the City University of New York stated that the destruction of the Challenger spacecraft should be applauded since it might deter white people from “spreading their filth throughout the universe.” Today there is also the questionable Ibram X. Kendi, who as Director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University calls for the American Constitution to be amended so as to enshrine “two guiding anti-racist principals” [sic], namely that “racial inequity is evidence of racist policy” and that “the different racial groups are equals.”[11] This is only a variation on the standard anti-racist trick. The “racist policy” is “institutional racism”; namely, any rule or requirement that applies equally to all and therefore shows differences between the races. The second “principle” aims to ban any reference to such differences. But America’s top universities continue with their institutional racism, admitting thousands of blacks each year with qualifications inferior to those of the whites and Asians they keep out. Many people have been aware of such practices for decades. Allan Bloom famously discussed them in 1987.[12]

Yet, many who should know better apparently still fail to see the truth of the situation. Recently, when Britain was undergoing daily accusations of being institutionally — or equivalently, “systemically” — racist, a commonly-heard reply was that this was untrue. Nigel Farage described Britain as a fair country.[13] Laurence Fox called it a lovely country where accusations of racism were out of place.[14] They should have called the accusers’ bluff and admitted that Britain was institutionally racist, but not in the way that the accusers meant; Britain is grotesquely institutionally racist in black people’s favor. But they could not see racism when it was their own race that was being victimized.

The term “institutional racism” is still used in both its natural and its anti-racist meanings, but it is also used with no identifiable meaning as simply the most comprehensive way available to condemn white society. Thus, when in 2020 an African woman was asked on breakfast television to comment on the statue of a seventeenth-century merchant and philanthropist who had profited from the slave trade being pulled down and dumped in Bristol harbor, she said that this had been a long time coming, since the United Kingdom was institutionally racist.[15]

The same lack of meaning can be seen in confessions. Also in 2020, the Director of the renowned Royal Academy of Dramatic Art wrote:

We are aware that RADA has been and currently is institutionally racist. We are profoundly sorry for the role we have played in the traumatic and oppressive experiences of our current and past Black students, graduates and staff.[16]

He promised to bring in a team of specialists to advise on a root-and-branch structural reform of the Academy that would end its institutional racism. He gave no examples of this “racism” or of the trauma and oppression that black people had supposedly endured at its hands, nor is it likely that he would have been able to do so. He just needed to confess to the worst of institutional sins so as to justify the greatest possible elevation of non-whites over whites at the Academy and the speediest possible reduction of its quality.

A traumatized black actress in character with colleagues (1990s)

The “institutional racism” scam could be exposed in a day if the mainstream media were to explain that it relies on the taboo against mentioning inherent racial differences. Once allowed to admit that these existed, people would be able to see the real reason for racial differences in outcome. But this will never happen, for who is more anti-racist than the mainstream media? When anti-racists claim to have detected a case of institutional racism, the media will never mock them for trying their old trick again. Instead, looking solemn and referring to the “campaigners” in respectful tones, they will broadcast the accusation as though something bad has been uncovered — not letting on that all that has been revealed is some remaining trace of equal treatment.

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Notes

[1] Sir William Macpherson, 1999, Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, CM 4262-I, The Stationery Office, Paragraph 6.34.

[2] James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1964, p. 197.

[3] The New Culture Forum, Nov. 25, 2022, “HM Treasury Goes Woke + Watchdog Tells Universities to Teach Racism & Patriarchy in STEM Courses.” According to the 2021 census, black people make up 4% of the population of England and Wales. This would drop of Scotland and Northern Ireland were included.

[4] Similar measures were introduced one after another for 25 years. Already by 1989, special treatment for non-whites was creating resentment in the police. See Roger Graef, Talking Blues: The Police in Their Own Words, London: Collins Harvill, 1989, pp. 134-38.

[5] History Debunked, Nov. 3, 2021. “Home Secretary Priti Patel wants police officers promoted for skin colour, rather than aptitude.”Simon Webb gives the links (1) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/20/black-police-officers-fast-tracked-senior-roles/ and (2) https://www.londonworld.com/news/met-police-commander-called-pregnant-colleague-f-nutter-misconduct-hearing-told-3441140.

[6] James Goddard, Aug. 1, 2020, “Politics, News & Nationalism Ep 1.”

[7] The Chancellor of the Exchequer was Rishi Sunak (parents born in Kenya and Tanzania, grandparents in India). The Attorney General was Suella Braverman (parents born in Kenya and Mauritius, grandparents in India). The Home Secretary was Priti Patel (parents born in Uganda, grandparents in India). The Health Secretary was Sajiv Javid (parents born in Pakistan). The Education Secretary was Nadeem Zahawi (an Iraqi). The Business Secretary was Kwasi Kwarteng (parents born in Ghana). Kemi Badenoch (family originally from Nigeria) was Minister for Levelling Up, and it was Alok Sharma (born in India), who presided at COP 26. The mother of James Cleverly, Minister for the Middle East, North Africa and North America was from Sierra Leone. See History Debunked, Jan. 11, 2022, “How British is the British government?”

[8] This was Chanelle Poku. See History Debunked, Dec. 8, 2021, “The awful consequences of positive discrimination.” See also https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/nhs-job-cheat-chanelle-poku-croydon-crown-court-b970225.html.

[9] This was Onyeka Nwelue. See (1) History Debunked, March 4 2023, “Another supposed ‘professor’ of African origin at Oxbridge,” and (2) Prof. Edward Dutton: the Jolly Heretic, March 5th 2023, “The New Old Corruption: Oxford and Cambridge’s Nigerian Fake Professor.”

[10] This was Jason Arday. See History Debunked, Feb. 24, 2023, “A boy who could not read and write until he was 18 becomes a professor at Cambridge University.”

[11] See (1) Ibram X. Kendi, 2019, Politico LLC, “Pass an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment,” and (2) Aspen Institute, June 26th 2019, “How to be an Antiracist.”

[12] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

[13] talkRADIO, June 12, 2020, “Nigel Farage says taking down statues will not end protests.”

[14] BBC, Jan. 17, 2020, “Row breaks out over Harry & Meghan royal finances question! | Question Time – BBC.”

[15] This was Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu speaking on Good Morning Britain on June 9, 2020: “The debate gets heated over whether controversial statues should be removed.”

[16] This was Edward Kemp writing in an e-mail quoted in Ikon London Magazine, June 30, 2020.