The Left’s Original Sin

“Racism” has been a confusing term over the last decade. I was a couple of years into high school when I first learned its definition beyond “the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and discrimination based on these beliefs.” It was in an after-school debate club where I was arguing against a resolution supporting affirmative action.

Our entire argument was predicated on reverse racism, how affirmative action was discrimination against the majority group. Side proposition’s speaker delivered a rebuttal patiently explaining how racism is ineffective without a power gradient that I still remember. He would also go onto become debate club president, and represent the school at national-level competitions.

I didn’t win that debate, and it took a while for me to understand the argument. The problem was that my original understanding of racism was different from the one now presented to me: I comprehended that racism was useless if the racists have no authority by which to enforce their views, but were poor bigoted people no longer racists? The meaning of racism had changed then and evolved into to what it means now.

To the best that I understand it, the definition of systemic racism is “behaviours, ideas, institutions, people and other things that create a system that disadvantages oppressed groups, and things that are complicit within that system”. That’s a useful definition, comprehensive in reach and often more meaningful than “discrimination based on race”, in that the concept of…