Over the past few decades, two extreme ideas have unfortunately gained wide acceptance: that racism is systemic in America; and that if you are white, you are by default privileged and racist. 

As a result, many young whites are ridden with guilt.  Meanwhile, leftists and radical blacks are advancing reverse racism – active discrimination against those who happen to be white.

No wonder a 2021 Gallup poll found white-black relations at a 20-year low: 57% of the respondents said relations were “somewhat” or “very” bad.  In The War on Whites, author Ed Brodow attributed the downturn to Barack Obama and his focus on racial division.  Harping on white supremacy and privilege fomented animosity and engendered an inquisition against whites, aimed at exorcising unconscious biases through a “racial justice shakedown.”

Examples abound of institutional level discrimination by exclusion of whites, unthinkable a decade ago and sure to provoke widespread outrage if blacks or Latinx were excluded.  Perhaps the most glaring instance is the establishment of quotas by the city of Asheville, North Carolina, for its Human Relations Commission.  Five white residents, represented by attorney Ruth Smith, have sued the city for employing “illegal discriminatory policies and procedures.”

More on the Asheville lawsuit later.  Before that, some other examples of the effrontery with which institutions are testing the waters on anti-white discrimination, perhaps in the hope of normalizing it eventually:

• To mark the second anniversary of her inauguration as mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot announced that she wouldn’t be granting one-on-one interviews to white reporters.  Her justification: the City Hall press corps was overwhelmingly white in a city where more than half the people identify as black, Latino, Native American, or Asian Pacific Americans.
• In August, retail giant Best Buy released a memo about a mini MBA-style training program for employees from which whites were specifically prohibited.  The social-media blowback was such that its CEO Corie Barry made her Twitter account private.
• Last year, Brown University offered an online teacher-training course meant only for black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).  It removed the restriction after a complaint.
• The University of Minnesota established a summer internship to prepare students for graduate school that excluded whites and offered stipends of $6,000 to black and Native American students.  The university is re-evaluating the program after a complaint.
• In 2021, Cornell University created a BIPOC-only rock-climbing course.  An instructor claimed it wasn’t discriminatory but aimed at making minorities comfortable in a white-centric sport.

Now for the details of the Asheville case.  In 2018, the city established a Human Relations Commission of Asheville (HRCA), a voluntary advisory board to “promote and improve human relations and achieve equity among all citizens.”  When it was set up, the commission was to have nine members; this was then raised to 15 members.  The membership criteria were: six African Americans; two Latinx; two LGBTQ; two aged 18-25; two to three living in public housing; two with disability; and three recognized as community leaders.

Last year, city attorney Aairn Miles and equity consultant Alayna Schmidt recommended the removal of these racial qualifications, recognizing them as constitutionally problematic and amounting to race quotas, not permitted under federal and state law.  At the time, Tanya Rodriguez, the HRCA chair, expressed concern that “our color” shouldn’t be “diluted out of the commission.”

The numerical quotas were removed, but new categories were created that effectively kept whites out unless they satisfied criteria such as being LGBTQ, disabled, etc.  And after facing quorum problems, in January this year, the HRCA’s strength was reduced to nine members, with membership open to up to three non-city residents of Buncombe County.

In February this year, there were four vacancies on the HRCA.  Among those who applied were John Miall, Robyn Hite, David Shaw, Danie Johnson, and Willa Grant – all white, not disabled, not LGBTQ, and not living in public housing, hence not meeting the criteria, but otherwise well qualified to serve.  Miall has in fact worked for the city for 30 years, including as its director of risk management.  Hite serves on a teachers’ board, and the others are professionals or citizens with a record of social service.

The city rejected them outright, neither interviewing them nor seeking more information about their qualifications.  Unable to fill the positions, the city has readvertised the vacancies.

Miall and the others sued Asheville on September 5 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, alleging they were rejected merely for their skin color in blatant violation of  the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment and also Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  On September 26 and 27, with assistance from the non-profit Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), they requested an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) and preliminary injunction and also filed an amended class action, seeking a court declaration that Asheville’s criteria are unconstitutional.  The amended class action dropped the Title VI claims, as they apply only to cases involving federal funding.  And on October 6, again with PLF’s assistance, the plaintiffs proposed inclusion of all past, present, future, and deterred non-minority applicants to the HRCA. 

The motion for the TRO (seeking emergency relief) and the preliminary injunction (seeking an opinion from the defendants) were denied by the court because the plaintiffs’ applications are still pending before the city council and they haven’t suffered irreparable harm.  The legal point that the criteria are still unlawful remains; so, in future, the court may annul any HRCA appointments made before its ruling in the case.  The city council was to consider the appointments on October 10. 

Asheville’s actions amount to addressing equity, as bolstered by Critical Race Theory, rather than equality, mandated by the Constitution.  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of the U.S.  curtailed affirmative action in college admissions as disadvantaging equally or better qualified whites.  As attorney Ruth Smith, representing Miall and others, says, “The Supreme Court has just said that the way to end discrimination is to end all discrimination, not keep on discriminating.”

The Asheville city council has discriminated against whites before, designating a scholarship program exclusively for black students and teachers.  In 2021, Judicial Watch (JW) and WNC Citizens for Equality Inc. filed a lawsuit against the city for this. Tom Fitton, the president of JW, described the exclusion as unconstitutional and said, “This civil rights lawsuit seeks to ensure that no student in Asheville is denied educational scholarship opportunities on account of race.”  In 2022, the city settled the lawsuit, agreeing to remove all racially discriminatory provisions of the program.

Commenting on such cases, law professor William Jacobson of Cornell, who also runs the Equal Protection Project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, says, “There is an increasing trend where people think it’s O.K. to discriminate on the basis of race as long as the discrimination is against whites or Asians or others, and we don’t accept that.”

Indeed, telling whites to undo their whiteness and renounce their privilege is being tolerated as “normal,” while it would be unthinkable and abhorrent to make a similar statement about blacks.  Billionaire talk show host Oprah Winfrey had no qualms about saying in a 2013 BBC interview: “There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die.”

It is in such an atmosphere of permissiveness for anti-white sentiment that unfair policies and programs such those mentioned in this column are being introduced, all in the name of fostering diversity.  These follow up on the sustained racial indoctrination of young minds through critical race theory at our universities and through public discourse.  But demonizing whites for non-existent “systemic racism” and “undue white privilege” only foments further racial division.  This must stop.

Image: Springfield College Archives and Special Collections, via Picryl // public domain