Systemic racism and reactionary violence are embedded into the foundation of the US political and social system, despite false claims of any sort of progress. Denying this reality is an act of mere delusion.
In an August interview with the online media platform, Shanghai Eye, the renowned intellectual, John Mearsheimer, expressed confidence that America’s immigration crisis would ultimately be resolved in the country’s favor.
The United States is going to be a less white country over time and there will be… a narrow slice of the population…who resists this trend but, uh, it's inevitable and the United States I believe will deal with it quite well.
Seemingly satisfied, the interviewer was preparing to move on but Mearsheimer wanted to expound.
I would point out to you that when I went into the army in 1965, the United States was at that point in time a country that had systemic racism…in the South we had Jim Crow America…and Jim Crow ended in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and then in 1965 those two pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act in 64 and the Voting Rights Act in 65, put an end to systematic racism. Of course, it took time to play out but when I went into the army in 1965 the Voting Rights Act had still not been passed so I went into an army that was a product of a society that had systemic racism built into it. Over time, that went away… Jim Crow America disappeared.
Am I saying that there has been no racism or there is no racism in the United States? Of course not, but there's nothing today compared to what we had in 1964 and 1965; that was systemic racism. We still have racism but again you want to remember that Barack Obama was elected president and you want to remember that Kamala Harris is one of the two candidates for the presidency and she may win and there are a number of people I know who say that she will win so I find the argument that, you know, the United States is suffering from systemic racism to be wrongheaded…
A professor of both political science and international relations at the University of Chicago, Mearsheimer, 74, is a favorite of progressive think tanks, podcasters and media outlets in the U.S. Widely known for his realpolitik approach to foreign policy, he has been a vocal critic of Washington’s antagonism of Moscow through its manipulation of Ukraine, and the blank check it has cut to its incorrigible ally, Israel.
But it beggars belief that a scholar as acclaimed as Mearsheimer could assert that institutionalized racism began to peter out in the 1960s. If anything it has only gotten worse as the U.S. has entered its post-industrial phase, depleting the economy of decent-paying jobs on the shopfloor and leaving investors with only the finance, insurance and real estate industries, --or FIRE sector—to turn a profit.
The shift from manufacturing to speculation has combined with austere, neoliberal policies to dry up public investment in the inner cities, paving the way for gentrification, increasing competition for good jobs, expanding predatory financial schemes —student debt, the prison industrial complex, subprime mortgages, unnecessary amputations –– that target African Americans.
A Harvard historian, Evelynn Hammonds, told the New York Times:
“There has never been any period in American history where the health of blacks was equal to that of whites. Disparity is built into the system.”
The demographics are different, but the U.S. resembles South Africa’s apartheid system, which was founded in 1948 to address the concerns of white soldiers who returned from World War II to find their jobs taken by Blacks. It is that same economic precarity that has stoked whites’ irrational fear of a “Negro takeover” in a historic pattern that dates back to the end of the Civil War.
An ABC News analysis of FBI statistics found that African Americans were the targets in 52.3 percent of the more than 8,500 hate crimes reported to police over a three-year span between 2020 and 2022. Similarly, law enforcement killed at least 1,096 people in 2022––more than 3 people per day on average–representing the deadliest year on record for police violence since The Washington Post began tracking the slayings nationwide in 2015. African Americans, the Post database found, were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by on-duty police than are whites.
A 2019 FBI analysis found that the number of hate crimes had risen by 42 percent over a five-year-span, representing the highest nationwide total since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. The increase is predicated mostly on a spike in hate crimes targeting African Americans. Analyzing data submitted by more than 15,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, the FBI identified 7,759 hate crimes, 2,755 of which identified Black victims, representing a 40 percent increase from the previous year. Anti-Asian assaults increased by 70 percent over the same period, but the aggregate numbers were relatively minuscule, from 158 to 274, while anti-white violence rose by 16 percent to 773.
Following a similar trend, the number of reported hate crimes in Los Angeles County rose by 23 percent in 2021, to 786, representing the highest total in nearly 20 years, according to LA County’s Commission on Human Relations. African Americans account for only 9 percent of the population in the county, but nearly half, or 46, percent of the total number of victims. Dominique DiPrima, the African American host of an AM radio show in southern California, told the Los Angeles Times:
Anti-Blackness is the tip of the sphere. It’s almost like we’ve normalized hate against Black people. It’s the default.
Capri Maddox, executive director of Los Angeles’ Civil Rights Department, told the Times that the city’s numbers are a microcosm of the country as a whole:
The FBI has been tracking hate crimes for 30 years and the consistent number one population of victims are African Americans.
Mearsheimer’s shocking minimization of structural racism is oddly mindful of Hannah Arendt’s denunciation of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education, in which she cast as envious social climbers Black parents who wanted their children to attend integrated schools.
As with Arendt, it seems unlikely that Mearsheimer’s views on racism in the U.S. is-- as the late historian John Henrik Clarke was fond of saying—a confession of everything he hasn’t read. Even the most perfunctory intellectual inquiry would reveal wrenching disparities that cannot be explained by anything other than racism: median wealth for Black households, $24,500, is less than one-tenth that of whites, $250,400; African American women are nearly three times more likely to die during childbirth than are white women; and federal sentencing for crack cocaine exceed those for powder cocaine by a ratio of 18 to 1, despite the fact that there is no difference between the two drugs other than the race associated with each.
All the more telling is that Mearsheimer teaches at the University of Chicago which is located in Illinois’ 1st Congressional District, where half of the district’s population of 750,000 is African American. Yet only 6 percent of the university’s undergraduates, and 3 percent of its faculty, are Black.
Mearsheimer’s bizarre remarks on the absence of systemic racism in the U.S. would suggest that he is a signatory to what the late Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills dubbed the “Racial Contract” in which whites agree to deliberately misinterpret the world in an effort to qualify the genocide, colonization, and slavery of nonwhite peoples. In his eponymous book, Mills wrote that the Racial Contract
“…establishes a racial polity, a racial state and a racial (judicial) system, where the status of whites and nonwhites is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom. And the purpose of this state …is to maintain and reproduce this racial order, securing the privileges and advantages of the full white citizens and maintaining the subordination of whites.”
Continuing, Mills writes of signatories to the Racial Contract:
One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular.
Thus in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions…
Increasingly, those cognitive dysfunctions take the form of a violent backlash as whites struggle to reconcile their colorblind fantasies with America’s ugly, racist reality. Social psychologists and survivors of racist attacks have often described white lynch mobs as possessed, as if an evil spell had been cast.
One attack tells the tale: as pro-Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, another white mob of nearly two dozen demonstrators–several clad in “Make America Great Again” caps–pummeled a 25-year-old African American woman in downtown Los Angeles in full view of police officers. The woman, Berlinda Nibo, told the Los Angeles Times:
It seemed like these people were trying to kill me. To use me to make some kind of statement or something.
Racist whites have always used violence to make statements against Black people. Mearsheimers and others of his ilk have always been their apologists.
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
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