Breaking Down The 'R' Word

It is flatly impossible for a normal human animal to go through life without preferences. It is discrimination that is the piston power of progress.

Friday, July 24th, 2026

Bill Bonner, from Poitou, France

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Here it comes — yes — the “r” word. That crackerjack, all-purpose, instant thought-terminator: Racist!

Our meditations on race have precious little to do with our meditations on interest rates or the fevers of the stock market. But they have been penned up in the barn so long, snorting and pawing, that we judged it safer to let them out before they kicked down the door.

And, like wokism and antisemitism, ‘racism’ plays an important role in dividing ‘The People,’ and uniting the central planners and busybodies against them.

Let the subject of immigration be raised, and the word “racist” comes trotting along at its heel, as faithful as a spaniel. Here is the freshest specimen, from CBS:

A disgruntled tenant executed three people over a Twin Cities parking dispute, the charges say. A 30-year-old St. Paul man stands accused of shooting three dead inside a leasing office over a quarrel about a parking garage.

And the man charged? One Tsegaab Binnesu. The name tips you off. But the press did not want to say. Nobody cares whether he chews meat or greens, whether his eyes are blue or brown, whether he kneels in a Protestant pew or a Catholic one. The pith of the story is that he is a thirty-year-old immigrant out of Egypt — and that, once more, a lawless newcomer has gunned down peaceable citizens.

Is it “racism” to say as much? The charge is hotly, indignantly denied. But it all hangs upon the definition of the word — and it is precisely there that we slip into a bottomless bog from which no man emerges with clean boots.

The thought fell upon us Sunday, after an unlovely encounter of our own with immigrants. African, Middle Eastern, or some blend — they were the very folk of whom the English used to say that “the wogs begin at Calais,” a “wog” being any homo sapiens who does not ‘look like us.’ Menaced by them on the road, our first thought was the ancient, reflexive one: they have no business here.

And yet they have more business here than we do. We are a mere visitor, an American who has lived in France, off and on for many years. Our tormentors, by contrast, enjoy the blessing of some post-colonial treaty or family tie that grants them the right to live in France, to draw upon her housing and unemployment subsidies, to make use of her free universities and hospitals...and to cast ballots in her elections.

Still — some people “fit in” better than others, and our three antagonists plainly had no wish to fit in at all. They announced, rather, their intention to “terrorize the bourgeoisie,” into which tribe they had placed us.

Most of us are at ease among those whose attitudes and behaviors are familiar and predictable. White people gravitate to white neighborhoods. Jews to Jewish ones. Alcoholics feel at home in bars. The Chinese keep to Chinatown.

Are the whole lot of them racists?

But we all have our prejudices — pets and peeves, bugaboos and darlings. A fellow might announce, with perfect candor, “I don’t care for Koreans.” Or “I don’t like kinky hair.” Or “Give me a redhead.” Does that enroll him among the racists?

If so, then racists we all are, every mother’s son, for it is flatly impossible for a normal human animal to go through life without preferences. It is discrimination – choosing the restaurant with the best chef and the builder who does the job on time, for example – that is the piston power of progress. And the man who surveys the whole of humanity with one blank, undiscriminating stare — as though we were so many interchangeable peas — is no model citizen, but a curiosity fit for a jar.

Even upon bended knee, “I love you because your kisses are just as sweet as everyone else’s” is unlikely to carry the day as a proposal of marriage.

No — we are all different, and the man who denies it is either a professor or a fool. And even small differences can work large effects. Between the Mount Vernon Club in Baltimore and West Baltimore on the far side of Howard Street lies a distance of scarcely four blocks — but you would not care to cross it, and certainly not after dark.

If the mere noticing of such differences makes racists of us all, then we may as well pitch the word into the ash-can, for you cannot indict a man for being precisely what every man is.

But what if we do not merely notice — what if we act upon what we feel? What if we decline to cross Howard Street? What if we steer clear of places stocked with the “wrong” sort of people? And yet — who among us does not hunt for the neighborhood where he feels at home? And where is that? Why, among people like himself!

In our own long and undistinguished career, we labored beside teams from England, India, China, and points beyond. We bore none of them the least ill will. But with some we got along better than others. All spoke English…but it was often difficult to get a point across. Were we racists for preferring to work with those we best understood?

And recall “redlining.” The notion was that lenders drew rings round the districts they cared not to serve — because, presumably, the borrowers therein did not pay them back. Redlining acquired its evil odor when it came out that those districts were peopled largely by “minorities.” ‘Racism!’ shrieked the earnest press, sniffing out a sinister motive.

Yet it strains belief that a profit-hungry institution would turn away a sound customer for the color of his hide or the street of his residence. Redlining was, in all likelihood, nothing more than a crude device for trimming the ledger of bad mortgages not for keeping groups of people without a roof over their heads. But the “racist” charge stuck and red-lining was outlawed.

But if neither noticing differences…nor acting on them…suffice to make a man a racist — what does? Have we been flogged so hard as “racist” that the calumny has lost its sting?

On Monday we will take a look at real racism. Not redlining. Not the harmless preferences of ordinary people. But something a good deal nastier.

Stay tuned.

Regards,

Bill Bonner

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