A statement from local Warren activist Mel Bynum is a bit of a head-scratcher.  G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal reports Bynum as saying, “There is no cure for racism — no vaccine — because such hatred, though born of ignorance, is taught.”  Isn’t it when things are not innate — that is, when they are taught — that we can be most optimistic of “a cure”?  That which can be taught can be untaught.  As Bynum, herself, says, “No one is born racist.”

No one is born an “anti-racist,” either.  Parents who’ve had the opportunity to eavesdrop on required college courses about anti-racism and oppression during the COVID era may have come to a surprising conclusion.  The professors are actually teaching racism.  According to these lessons, every person’s race must be observed and catalogued, each variation calling for different behavior.  Moreover, race must be considered central to the interpretation of every statistic and personal outcome.

Throughout Western society and by means of multiple institutions, people are being taught to be racist.

Birkbeck College Politics Professor Eric Kauffman has found a strong correlation between higher education and social media usage and the perception of racial differences in interactions.  “Across several questions, controlling for age, income, education and other factors, social media exposure significantly increased a Black person’s sense that they had been a victim of racial discrimination,” he writes.  Moreover, “college-educated Black Americans are significantly more likely than those without a degree to be offended by so-called microaggressions, like people saying, ‘I don’t notice race.'”

Kauffman finds this effect damaging to the empowerment of Black Americans.  A result this stark demands confirmation by other social scientists, but according to Kauffman, reading a single paragraph from critical race theorist Ta-Nehisi Coates drops Black respondents’ confidence that they can accomplish their plans by fifteen percentage points, from 83% to 68%.

Effects across races can be even more dramatic.  White liberals are much more likely to see “African-Americans… as weak and needing protection.”  Black respondents were pretty evenly split on the question of whether political correctness is “demeaning” versus “necessary.”  White liberals split 62-38 on this question.

This returns the topic to Mel Bynum and the largely white and generally older group of people who joined her to “rally against white supremacist stickers” in their small New England town, as G. Wayne Miller’s headline proclaims.  The spark for their action was “the recent appearance of white supremacist stickers on signs along a main thoroughfare,” as shown in the featured image of this post (screen captured from a clip from WPRI reporter Brittany Schaefer).

In a parody of McCarthy-ite paranoia, Bynum warns against ignoring white supremacists’ efforts “to infiltrate our communities.”  No other signs of infiltration have emerged, other than this handful of stickers.  If they are the extent of the assault, then activists’ characterization of racism as a “pandemic” must be more applicable than they know, implying that it is, in fact, innate among white people and can be triggered by the mere sight of a foolish slogan.

At this point, the default assumption should be that the stickers are a hoax perpetrated to create the opportunity for activism.  The next-most-likely possibility is a prank.  Indeed, across the country, one finds (as a catch-phrase often repeated on Instapundit puts it), the demand for racism far exceeds the supply.

The chilling, threatening assaults tend to go the other way, such as the pig’s head and splattered blood at the private home of a family unfortunate enough to have moved into a house once inhabited by a witness for Derek Chauvin’s defense.

The contrast in actual threat between these incidents is too obvious to miss, as is the source of racial strife in modern America.

The cure for racism is education.  More and more, that means choosing not to teach it in the form of critical race theory.  The problem is that the cure is not tolerable to the fully indoctrinated progressives who’ve built their very identities around the illness.