What We Would Need to Eradicate Racism
Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Anti-racism cannot drive out racism. To do that, we need something substantively good, and more powerful.
To begin to oppose racism we would need a reasoned ground on which to criticize racism as unjust. We must reject moral equivalence between all points of view, else the racist’s perspective would be just as valid as our own. Racism cannot merely be someone else’s personal preference; it must be wrong. So, we would need a set of moral principles that are objectively true, whether or not any one of us assents to them. In short, we would need the natural law.
To defeat racism, we would need people to believe that one should treat others as they would be treated, and love one’s neighbor as oneself. We would have to teach people, and they would need to accept as true, that all people are created radically equal—equal in a dignity that is grounded in immutable nature and reflects the image of the Source of being and meaning. It would be helpful if that Source were a personal God who revealed that He loves all human beings, who are created in His image. In short, we would need Christianity, or something very much like it.
Because people do not always do what they ought, we would need laws of a particular kind. We would need legal rights and duties that are determined by our nature and our ancient customs which precede government, and that are discerned and settled by our reason, so that our rights are not contingent upon the will of the powerful, nor of public officials. People should be able to go to a neutral agent who is knowledgeable about our natural and customary rights and duties in order to obtain from him or her legal justice. It would also be good to have a legal institution that enlists members of the community—we might call them “jurors”—to resolve our disputes and to render verdicts against wrongdoers. We would need time-tested methods for adjudicating accusations of wrongdoing—call those methods “due process”—to ensure that innocent people are not placed under the power of judgment along with the guilty. In short, we would need something very much like the common law.
Because law can change, we need political institutions that are committed to those principles of natural and legal justice that must not change: that racial differences are not valid reasons for differential treatment, that no official can abrogate our natural and immutable rights, that all are entitled to a presumption of innocence and liberty, and the due process of law. It would be good to have political institutions founded on principles of equal, natural rights, such as those expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Massachusetts Constitution, the Northwest Territories Act. We would be helped by memorable expressions of those principles, such as the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and the speeches and writings of James Wilson, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It would be helpful to have at least one political party founded for the purpose of eradicating slavery, with the conviction to label racist institutions as among the “relics of barbarism.” In short, we would benefit from having a political community such as America.