On this week’s episode of Life, Liberty, and Levin, Dr. Wilfred Reilly pushed back on the concept of systemic racism. Reilly told Mark Levin that many of the examples cited by activists have huge variables other than race to explain why they happen. He said that while systems of oppression have existed in America in the past, many of them have disappeared under our civil rights laws.
Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University, a historically black university. He has authored three books, including Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War:
Professor Wilfred Reilly examines over one hundred widely publicized incidents of so-called hate crimes that never actually happened. With a critical eye and attention to detail, Reilly debunks these fabricated incidents—many of them alleged to have happened on college campuses—and explores why so many Americans are driven to fake hate crimes. We’re not experiencing an epidemic of hate crimes, Reilly concludes—but we might be experiencing an unprecedented epidemic of hate crime hoaxes.
Levin asked Reilly about the concept of systemic racism, to which he responded,
Systemic or institutional racism as an academic is a phrase that I’m always a bit skeptical of. Now obviously, if we want to be honest about some of this country’s history, there have been systems like criminal sentencing in the past, where until quite recently, you did see discrimination at kind of a broad, group-targeted level.
But very often this phrase simply means there’s a difference in performance between two groups, and we’re going to attribute that to racism. To give an example of why that doesn’t necessarily work, my favorite sports league, the NBA–the National Basketball Association—is more than 65% black. I don’t think any serious person would believe that’s because white jocks just don’t get a fair shake in American society. The reason is that there’s what you might call a cultural variable. African-Americans play basketball more. On average, with all due respect to the Hick from French Lick [Larry Bird], we’re better at it. – READ MORE
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