RACISM & ANTIRACISM @ BOSTON UNIVERSITY

 

[This is an expanded version of a letter I sent to the Bostonia, the alumni magazine of Boston University. I received the Master of Education degree from BU in 1978.]

 

Two articles in the Winter-Spring 2021 issue quickly caught my eye- the endowed professorship of antiracism in the law school and the trustee committee to end systemic racism at BU.

Racism is evil- always has been and always will be. I learned that as a teenager in the 1960s. My grandparents taught me that it is a person’s character that defines that person and not the color of their skin. So why does it take the murder of a black man by a police officer in 2020 make corporations and institutions suddenly make accusations of systemic racism against others and/or confessions of their own involvement in this evil?  Really- systemic racism? The kind of racism that is embedded into the cultural DNA of any organization and institution in this nation- including BU?

Granted, some past and current practices at BU could be considered racist. But was BU engaged in systemic racism when Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded a PhD in 1955, when Edward Brooke, Barbara Jordan and Gary Locke earned JDs in 1948, 1959 and 1975 respectively, and when John Silber was president from 1971- 1996? It is much too easy to desire a sledgehammer to eliminate racism, but it is going to take a scrapple to do this hard work effectively.

We yearn to end this evil entirely but we do not realize the possible unintended consequences our actions may incur. We also yearn for world peace but as the Italian political theorist Gaetano Mosca noted in such a world we would have a single social type and a single religion with no social disagreements. Relatedly, we also yearn for security from our enemies. This condition could generally be generally be obtained with total electronic surveillance into the totality of our private lives and thoughts (think Minority Report) with secret courts (not just the FISA Court), no warrants to search us and our property, and no due process to defend ourselves.  This is the path I am afraid that to end systemic racism with the tool of antiracism will lead us.

Be to “anti” racism may be effective in eliminating racism but it does cast a vision for a preferred future. In the Christian New Testament Jesus tells a story about a man who cleans house and rids himself of all the resident demons. Because he does not replace the demons with something good the demons return in greater force and the man and his house was worst off than before.

Even in the best of times we will always have racists just assuredly we will always have criminals, tax cheats, drunk drivers, and corrupt politicians.  To take liberties with the counsel of John Quincy Adams that America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, if we turn on each other to destroy the monsters we perceive others to have, we will destroy us and the monsters will win and live on even more powerfully. In the words of James Madison in The Federalist, “If men were angels…”