The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

by Ben Shapiro

Black Panther honorary prime minister Stokely Carmichael, along with Charles Hamilton, wrote in 1967 in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that institutional racism went far too deep for anything but total systemic change to abrogate it. “Racism is both overt and covert,” they wrote. “It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism.” Institutional racism is vague and difficult to target—but we can tell it by its fruits. Wherever there is disparity, there is obviously discrimination. When black Americans lack “proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.” White people may not be bombing churches anymore or stoning black families, but they are still “support[ing] political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies.” Thus, political disagreement is merely a guise for covert racism.24