A Racist Pledge

This weekend, a controversial letter began making the rounds from an organization called Dallas Justice Now. In an effort to "end institutional racism and create opportunities for the black community," the group is asking white liberals who live in Highland Park who have expressed their support for the Black Lives Matter movement to take an additional step and "sign a pledge to commit to not sending their children to Ivy League or US News & World Report Top 50 schools" to increase capacity for historically marginalized communities.

No, really. Take a look below:

At the bottom of the pledge found on their website respondents are given the option to either sign the pledge or declare themselves to be a "racist hypocrite." The organization plans to publicize who has and has not signed their pledge. Just so we are 100% clear, no, this is not from The Onion or Babylon Bee, this is a real pledge created by a real organization in the United States of America.

This pledge is racist, plain and simple. To tell white parents that unless they pledge to send their children to inferior schools, that they, themselves, are racist is nothing more than marxism parading as social justice.

As we have written in the past, the issue of racism will never and can never be solved with more racism. Martin Luther King, Jr., acknowledged this when he famously stated his dream for his children was to "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." This pledge violates this ideal on every level.

It is unquestionably true that many Black Americans were prohibited from attending the universities and other institutions of higher education of their choice for far too long. It is not lost on me that these previous generations have, as a result, suffered harm that puts their children and grandchildren in a disadvantaged position today. However, the way we address this wrong isn't to promote more racism and prohibit opportunity to white children or children of any race. That's not advancing equality.

Movements such as what we see from Dallas Justice Now are not about achieving equal opportunity for historically marginalized communities, they are about retribution and subjugating others for the sins of their ancestors, or even the ancestors of others that just happen to share the color of their skin.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, it seemed as though racism was on its way toward being a relic of the past. Racism carried such a social stigma, that generally speaking statements or actions rooted in prejudice were not tolerated by the public at large. Sure there were occasional bad actors, but it was not the systemic issue faced by previous generations.

That all went out the window in the mid-2000s when leftists realized they could leverage identity politics and white guilt for political gain and advancing systemic change. Over the last few years, as post-modernism and critical theory have moved from fringe academia within our universities into the cultural lexicon at-large, it has only gotten worse.

Perhaps we have reached a crescendo, with the pledge found in the letter above. I truly hope that this is where people draw the line, and that far-left activists have overplayed their hands. Surely mothers and fathers care deeply enough about their own offspring that they would never do anything to purposefully harm their chances at a bright future.

We cannot allow this cycle of hate to continue. Initiatives like this need to be called out for what they are — an attempt to answer for previous overt racial discrimination by instituting another round of it. We can never find ourselves living MLK's dream if current and future generations of Americans continue to find themselves held back because of the color of their skin.