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In a scheme that immediately appeared destined to face legal challenges, on Oct. 14, the Harris-Walz campaign’s “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” promised to provide 1 million fully forgivable loans of up to $20,000 specifically for black entrepreneurs.

Destiny came even sooner than one might have expected. Amid a media backlash, activist litigator Edward Blum threatened to sue the future Harris administration over the policy. Just two days after announcing the agenda, on Oct. 16, the campaign backtracked and stated the loans would be open to all regardless of race.

Despite the backtrack, the loans were just one of a slate of policies designed specifically to benefit black men — a demographic that was once a Democrat stronghold, but which polling shows moving toward Trump — in a strategy evoking Tammany Hall’s famously corrupt system of paying impoverished immigrants for votes.

The “legal plunder” of taxing one group to enrich another is sufficiently corrosive to social harmony to warrant outrage, but perhaps even more appalling is the presentation of blatant racism as “progressive.” How did our society advance through the legal and moral principle of equal protection under the law and the historic victory of civil rights only to reverse into a major party’s presidential campaign thinking it was a good idea to send out a racially discriminatory policy proposal?

The answer is so simple it’s almost comic: they just changed the definition of the word “racism” to mean something else.

Historically defined as “prejudice or discrimination based on race,” far-left activists have long worked to redefine the word toward something more convenient for their political ends: “power + prejudice.” Following the killing of George Floyd, so-called “anti-racist” activists such as best-selling author Robin DiAngelo leveraged reasonable sympathy for their cause to spread this redefinition far and wide. It now dominates academia, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs, K-12 education, and increasingly government institutions worldwide.

The redefinition implies that one cannot be racist against groups with institutional power (white Americans), but only against members of oppressed groups (black and other minority Americans). Continuing the manipulative language game, “institutional power” too is defined in a manner narrow enough to somehow exclude that held by the woman who proposed last week’s racially discriminatory policies, the potential incoming half-black president of the most powerful institution on earth — the U.S. government.

Destructive Definition

The impact of this redefinition’s adoption has been predictably destructive. Shaking off the “racist” label, those who have bought into the redefinition have felt newly empowered to practice racism against those in the supposed power group, in turn increasing racist reaction, a vicious cycle undoing the decades of progress our society has made in the fight for equality.

Seeking to understand the source of this destruction, I conducted an investigation into the origins of the “power + prejudice” redefinition of “racism,” scouring university library special collections and other rare documents to identify who came up with it and why. What I found shocked me, and further clarifies who no one should take the redefinition seriously.

The first use of “power + prejudice” on record was in an “anti-racist” course curriculum written by white high school teacher Patricia Bidol in 1970. Bidol was a proponent of the philosophy of “New White Consciousness” developed by her friend Robert Terry, a theologian and corporate “anti-racist” workshop educator. Terry’s New White Consciousness taught that the best a white American could be was an “anti-racist racist,” as all white Americans were inherently racist as a result of their privilege. 

New White Consciousness drew heavily from the black consciousness philosophy of Stokely Carmichael, the Marxist-Leninist “Black Power” activist who explicitly opposed racial integration. While chairman of the then-prominent Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (“non-violent” being a misnomer under Carmichael’s leadership), Carmichael expelled all white activists from the group, explaining that blacks and whites should not work together, and instead whites should work to spread his views within the white community. That’s exactly what Terry and Bidol did, and what the “power + prejudice” redefinition was designed in service of.

Racial Integration

For those of us who support racial integration, there was and is a better way. In 1968 — the same year that Carmichael left the U.S. to move to Africa with the goal of forming a pan-African Marxist-Leninist black ethnostate — Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing his multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race. Given the poverty rate among black Americans, King knew the campaign’s proposals would affect them most, but he also knew that building a more just future meant helping everyone. While the quality of the economic proposals of his campaign could be reasonably challenged, King was correct that after the civil rights movement, identity politics was counterproductive to achieving the united America he dreamed of.

Americans must understand the truth behind the philosophy Harris espouses and reject it. True anti-racism means returning to King’s ideal of treating people without regard to their race (also known as being color-blind, although leftists have unfairly straw-manned and attacked the term). Only through this approach can we can reverse the growing racial division in our nation.

Joseph (Jake) Klein is a writer, filmmaker, and co-founder of online publication The Black Sheep. He is also the author of “Redefining Racism: How Racism Became ‘Power + Prejudice.'” Follow him on X @josephjakeklein.