Published June 22nd, 2022
Letters to the editor
Antiracism IS racism

A letter published June 8th asserted that "Antiracism is not racism" and "the recent mass murder of black people in Buffalo by a racist white man [is] part of an enduring legacy of whites killing blacks." Neither statement is accurate.
Kendi popularized the term "antiracism" in "How to be an Antiracist." On page 19, he writes "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." He calls for more racism in the form of racial discrimination. Discrimination based on race is racism. Opposing racism is good. Working to combat racism is better. But antiracism is just more racism. And although its performative aspects target whites, its real victims are usually Asians, as admissions data from colleges and from selective high schools such as Lowell demonstrate.
Regarding Buffalo and an alleged "enduring legacy of whites killing Blacks," the data shows the opposite. Per black professor Wilfred Reilly, "The narrative that America today is crawling with white supremacists . is not supported by the facts. Annual Bureau of Justice Statistics reports show all inter-race violent crime involving whites and blacks typically makes up only about three per cent of serious crime against a person or property. Furthermore, this smallish category of criminal offending is not dominated by whites. In 2018, there were 59,778 white-on-black violent crimes, compared with 547,948 black-on-white violent crimes, out of roughly 20 million total crimes. This category of crime, broken down along racial lines, is just over 90 per cent black-on-white. Those figures are not entirely typical, but the black-white ratio has been at least 75:25 in every postwar year I have ever examined."
www.spiked-online.com/2022/05/27/buffalo-and-the-myth-of-americas-race-war/
See also Reilly's book "Taboo" and "Race and crime in the United States" at Wikipedia, which states, "The per-capita [homicide] offending rate for African-Americans was roughly eight times higher than that of whites, and their victim rate was similar."
The resolution proposed by Mr Berti does not prevent teaching actual history, only assigning guilt for historical acts to current students based on their race.

Robert Lavoie
Lafayette

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