José Manuel Suárez Mier*
In past installments, I presented the evolution of racism in the United States and how a line of thought emerged, the CRT, which affirms that all whites are racists and that a new social order is required based on the victory of the oppressed over the oppressors, following the gospel of Karl Marx.
This movement had its culmination with the New York Times Project 1619, named for marking the arrival of the first black slaves to the English colonies of America and trying to locate “the aftermath of slavery and the contribution of blacks to the center of the national narrative. “
From that perspective, the usual history of the United States as a heroic gesture led by founders of exceptional wisdom and principles, creating a democracy based on respect for human rights and equal opportunities, is very different by emphasizing that all these excluded blacks.
These ideas and proposals fueled the resurgence of white supremacists who, when Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, managed to penetrate the Republican Party, paradoxically founded by Abraham Lincoln to combat slavery.
It must be remembered that white supremacy has had its ups and downs in US history, but it never completely disappeared. At the beginning of the last century, eugenics, which maintains that there are races with genetic characteristics superior to those that come from interbreeding with other races, had a great boom.
Major US and UK universities turned eugenics into a “respectable science.” They proclaimed the superior value of the Nordic races over the rest, fearing that their good gene pool would be diluted with the invasion of inferior races.
Adolf Hitler was an admirer of the “advanced science of eugenics” in the US, as he wrote in Mein Kampf where he applauded “the progress made towards a racial definition of the concept of nationality that prevents the naturalization of inferior races,” which inspired his heinous policy of “ethnic cleansing.”
A century later, it is recognized with horror that eugenics was a spurious pseudoscience that caused immense damage. But its brief and malignant existence proved something valuable: a simple but fallacious concept can be embraced by academics and, from being an absurd dogma, become a scientific truth.
What have we learned from all this? Apparently, nothing because something similar happens now. As they did with eugenics, the most reputable universities embrace the concept of “systematic racism” and have made it its scientific truth: all whites are complicit in a “hierarchical, furtive and omnipresent social order, of domination and submission.”
Against this, liberal thought survives away from dogmatic intellectual circles and values individual power, freedom of expression, and open and honest debate. Liberal ideals support religious freedom but reject sectarian cults, magical thinking, and hoax.
The dilemma is whether this liberalism, which made possible the greatest progress in the history of humanity, will survive the intransigent onslaught of both ideological extremes, now cloaked in an irremediable racial confrontation.
*Consultant in economics and strategy in Washington DC and professor at universities in Mexico (ITAM) and the U.S. (Georgetown and American) Email: aquelarre.economico@gmail.com
This column will also be published in Spanish on July 15, 2021, in the Excélsior newspaper, based in México City.