Are Dems the real racists?

There’s a sense of the word “racist” in which white Democrats are more racist than white Republicans.

Written by Noah Carl.

Weary of constant accusations that their side is racist, some conservatives like to argue that “Democrats are the real racists”. Such arguments come in at least three different forms.

The first is that “Dems are the real racists” because it was them who passed Jim Crow laws in the South. This argument finds expression in Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Big Lie, which purports to expose the “Nazi Roots of the American Left”. The second is that “Dems are the real racists” because their policies actually do harm to non-white communities. “Welfare destroyed the black family”, it is often said. The third is that “Dems are the real racists” because they’re the ones who obsess over race, ignoring Martin Luther King’s dictum to judge people by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin.

Other conservatives lampoon these arguments, or at least claims to the effect that “Dems are the real racists”, on the grounds that they concede far too much ground to the left. After all, such claims take for granted that being considered “racist” is the worst possible thing and whichever side is shown to be less “racist” will inevitably occupy the moral high ground. As the journalist Darren Beattie notes, Republicans are “obsessed with proving that they’re not racist” because “they don’t understand it’s a game”. Racism “properly defined” is wrong, he says, “but it shouldn’t be a national obsession”.

I’m inclined to agree with Beattie. Certainly the first two arguments for why “Dems are the real racists” fall wide of the mark.