Star Parker: Government and Politics Won't Solve Our Racial Problem

When horrible things happen, such as the tragic mass murder that occurred at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, we try to understand because it is through understanding that we solve problems.

Speaking about the incident, Hillary Clinton said: “It is tempting to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident — to believe that in today’s America, bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists. But despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.”

Some of the Republican candidates for president are taking heat because they have not come out so boldly and clearly as Clinton regarding the racial dimension of this crime.

Here’s the problem. No one, particularly with all the information we now have about the deranged young man who admitted to committing this crime, can question his racial motivations. He was a sick, pathological racist.

But Clinton, in her zeal to make political capital from this tragedy, conflated and confused very different things — racial bigotry and institutionalized racism — and as a result, at a difficult and sensitive moment, threw out heat when we needed light.

Institutionalized racism is racism that a society officially endorses. It is present when there is a legal framework that supports it.

Institutionalized racism existed in the United States prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Social realities and laws that permitted racial discrimination of various kinds were made illegal by those acts.

So Clinton misrepresents reality to suggest that “institutionalized racism” exists today in America. It does not.

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