Friday on HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher stated that the truth has to be in the middle between people on the right who “say reverse racism is a worse problem” and Critical Race Theory’s argument that “racism is everything and everywhere.”
“It seems like I live in a country where half the country sees that there’s no racism,” Maher said. “I’ve made many jokes about the polling that always shows that about two-thirds of Republicans say reverse racism is a worse problem. That’s been a fodder of comedy here. And then — really, so they say racism is gone, and then there’s a big part now, I think, critical race theory they call it, where racism is everything and everywhere. Please tell me that we all agree the answer’s somewhere in the middle.”
Maher is the proverbial broken clock that periodically gets things right, but in this instance he is wrong, as usual, if not actually intentionally misleading. The right does not deny that racism exists, only that “structural racism” does not exist. Critical Race Theory posits that “whiteness” is inherently racist and that all the structures of the capitalist West are irredeemably racist. Even Maher apparently thinks this goes too far.
Also, there is no such thing as “reverse” racism, which implies that racism is standard for whites and rare for non-whites, but anti-white racism is indeed a worse problem today in America, and demonstrably so.