An Example of Institutional Racism in America
Political opportunism, emotionalism, and a lack of historical context have perverted – inverted – the topic of race in America.
Today, everything is about race. In fact, Harvard’s Crimson confirmed it ten years ago in a piece entitled, “Everything Is About Race.”
Democrats deliberately perpetuate that notion on a daily basis. Their party’s sanctimonious, politically-correct doctrinaires insist that “unconscious” or “implicit” bias makes all white people racists. Furthermore, everything is “racist” due to America’s “systemic” or “institutional racism.”
Democrats are even using race to undermine American institutions.
Elected Democrats attack the Electoral College as an “instrument of White Supremacy,” even though the U.S. Constitution makes no mention of race. The Electoral College was a compromise among Constitutional Convention delegates to settle a disagreement concerning electing presidents by a vote of Congress or by popular vote.
More recently, the House minority leader and leader of the House Democratic Caucus, Hakeem Jeffries, a black man, went ballistic over a colorblind U.S. Supreme Court decision.
On April 29, the Court’s race-neutral Louisiana v. Callais ruling struck down grotesquely-gerrymandered, race-based congressional maps that create minority House districts at the expense of constitutionally-guaranteed equal representation. The Court allowed for immediate, pre-midterm redistricting to remedy the inequities. The unconstitutional, racially-gerrymandered districts were created and are held by Democrats.
Angry, Representative Jeffries called the decision “Jim Crow,” even though a black justice concurred in the decision.
And, always-eloquent, former Vice-President Kamala Harris accused the court of “back-dooring racism.”
If either were familiar with – or honest about – their party’s history, they would know more about Jim Crow laws, including which party created them.
Democrats have an ugly history of institutional racism.
The Democratic Party historically supported slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan.
Democrats’ annual “Jefferson-Jackson Day” honorees both owned slaves. Military officer/President Andrew Jackson dispatched native-Americans on a “trail of tears and death.”
Every Democratic platform from 1840 through 1860 contained planks explicitly defending slavery. Prior to secession, their 1860 platform implicitly supported the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision which legal scholars believe was designed to write slavery into the Constitution.
Northern Democrats, a/k/a, “Copperheads,” opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and, as the Civil War ended, resisted passage of the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery.
The Confederacy surrendered its battle flag forever in 1865, but Democrats continued to fight equality by opposing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments which guaranteed rights and protections for American citizens, including former slaves. Democrats then devised new oppressions such as poll taxes and Jim Crow laws (paging Hakeem Jeffries!) to deny emancipated blacks voting rights.
In the 20th Century, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, an avowed racist, segregated the Army and federal government. Both were integrated by Republicans before Wilson, and re-integrated by Republicans after FDR.
Founded by Democrats, the Ku Klux Klan, described by historians as a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party, ran the Democrats’ 1924 New York convention, popularly known as the “Klanbake.”
President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black, a lifetime Klan member, to the Supreme Court, and KKK Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops, Democrat Robert Byrd, was president pro tem of the Senate, third in line to the presidency, from 1989 to 2010.
A 1956 “Southern Manifesto” expressed opposition to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling which directed the integration of public schools. Ninety-nine of the 101 congressional signees were Democrats.
In the current climate of politically-correct hysteria, there is no modern “context” to excuse Jackson, Wilson, Byrd and other racist progenitors and members of the modern Democratic Party.
Elected Democrats have many negative qualities, but few worse than hypocrisy, especially on the matters of race, personal freedoms and voting rights.
It’s peak hypocrisy for Democrats to accuse political opponents – or anybody – of the sins of which, for two centuries, their own party has been guilty.
Karl Marx wrote: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggles.”
Liberal Democrats’ affectations of political correctness, and their accusations of “white supremacy” sustain – exploit – Marx’s essential political paradigm, perpetuate a myth of pervasive racism in America, and also serve as deflections to avoid facing disagreeable and embarrassing truths about their party’s history, their ambitions, and the unintended consequences of their radical legal, economic and social policies that have – and will – cost them elections.
Democrats are still holding/playing the race card, even though, today, it’s really a 7-2 offsuit fold.
https://www.pottsmerc.com/2026/05/24/jerry-shenk-an-examination-of-institutional-racism-in-america/
