The activist class keeps feeding America’s racial divide

The racial-grievance activist class is making the racial divide worse by teaching Americans to misread every disparity as discrimination.

Tom Woods shared a revealing exchange this week, and it says more about America’s racial divide than most people will want to admit.

Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, recently posted this: “At Yale Medical School, a black applicant is 29 times more likely to be invited to interview than an Asian with equally strong academics.”

A black critic on X fired back by pointing to Yale Medical School’s enrollment numbers. Yale has 553 students across all four classes. There are 44 black students and 157 Asian students. That works out to roughly 11 black students per class and about 40 Asian students per class.

Then came the familiar argument from the activist class

Black Americans are roughly 14 percent of the country, but only 7 percent of Yale Medical School. Asian Americans are roughly 7 percent of the country, but 28 percent of Yale Medical School. So, the critic asked, who exactly is being discriminated against?

On the surface, this sounds like a crushing rebuttal.

It’s not.

Nothing in that response actually contradicts Dhillon’s claim. The critic cited final enrollment totals. Dhillon referred to interview odds among applicants with equally strong academic credentials.

You can have more Asian students enrolled overall while still giving black applicants preferential treatment at a specific stage of the admissions process. Those two facts are not mutually exclusive. They can both be true at the same time.

This is the trick that fuels so much racial resentment in America: point to an outcome disparity, ignore the inputs, and then declare discrimination. Sadly, the cherry-picking extends beyond race.

That’s the grievance machine in action

The godforsaken grievance machine never asks how many students applied. Nor will it ask how strong the applicant pools were. Ditto for MCAT scores, GPA distributions, academic preparation, interview rates, acceptance rates, or the number of qualified applicants competing for limited seats.

It looks at a percentage that gives it a sliver of an argument and says, “See? Racism.”

But raw percentages don’t prove discrimination. They often prove nothing more than differences in applicant pools, preparation, choices, incentives, culture, geography, study habits, family structure, school quality, career interest, and academic performance. Those explanations aren’t as emotionally satisfying as blaming racism, but they’re often far more accurate. That’s why the activist class hates them.

If disparities have complex causes, the activist loses his favorite weapon. The same goes for when unequal outcomes aren’t automatic proof of oppression, then the whole business model cracks. When people ask whether preparation, qualification, and merit explain a gap, the racial grievance industrial-complex is forced to defend its assumptions instead of shouting accusations.

Plenty of black Americans want nothing to do with racial grievance politics. Many are tired of elite activists, academics, DEI officers, media pundits, and civil rights lawyers who treat them like permanent victims in need of bureaucratic rescue. Those smug assclowns specialize in victimizing blacks and other minorities far more than those accused of victimizing them.

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Racial grievance activists make America’s racial divide worse

They train people to see conspiracy in every disparity, encourage black Americans to think every statistical gap proves someone cheated them, and brainwash Asian and white Americans to believe that institutions will punish them for performing too well. Then everyone walks away more suspicious, bitter, and less willing to trust the person standing next to them.

That is racial arson dressed up as justice. And if you want to know what exploitation looks like. Read the previous two paragraphs again, again, and again until the message sinks through.

The Yale example shows how this works. Instead of asking whether similarly qualified applicants were treated equally, the critic jumped straight to group representation. He compared the racial makeup of Yale Medical School to the racial makeup of America and assumed that any shortfall must suggest discrimination.

But medical schools admit applicants. Not the national population. More specifically, they admit applicants who completed years of difficult coursework, took the MCAT, earned competitive GPAs, assembled serious applications, and chose to apply to elite medical programs.

That applicant pool will never mirror the entire country. Once you understand that, the activist argument falls apart.

Only one type of representation matters: Merit

If one group has a deeper pool of high-scoring applicants, that group can remain heavily represented in the final class even while facing discrimination at the margin. Likewise, another group can stay numerically smaller than its national population share while still receiving significant admissions preference.

Again, those things can both be true.

But the activist class hates that conversation. It wants the easier, more emotional one where all roads lead back to racism, because that’s where its power lives.

This is why racial politics in America feel impossible to resolve. The system rewards people who keep the wound open. Politicians get votes, DEI consultants get contracts, lawyers get lawsuits, journalists get outrage clicks, universities get moral cover, and activists get status. Guess what? Activists love and get drunk on that status.

Ordinary people get distrust

That is the part nobody wants to say out loud. The racial divide’s a political product. It’s cultivated, monetized, and protected by people who need Americans to think we’re locked in permanent racial combat so its industrial-complex survives and thrives.

The activist needs a racial divide. If they heal it, then they’re out of business.

Without suspicion, he has no product. No resentment? There’s no audience. Lack of disparities? He can’t hammer home a lawsuit. Without racial tension, he has no reason to be at the center of public life, earning views and monetizing his venture.

That doesn’t mean racism never exists. Of course it does, and it’s one of the sickest forms of collectivism. Individuals discriminate, institutions abuse power, and people treat others like hell because of race.

But not every disparity is discrimination. Unequal outcome doesn’t automatically prove oppression. And it certainly doesn’t follow that America should keep empowering a professional activist class that turns every spreadsheet into an indictment of the country.

A serious society asks better questions

Who applied? Who was qualified? What were their scores? Their grades? What were the standards? Were those standards applied equally? Did the institution reward merit, or did it manipulate outcomes to satisfy racial politics?

Those are adult questions. The grievance class avoids them because adult questions threaten their childish narratives.

America doesn’t need more racial sorting, more bureaucrats counting skin color, or more activists brainwashing people to view one another as members of hostile racial blocs.

It needs the courage to say that merit matters, facts matter, and unequal outcomes aren’t proof of injustice.

The racial divide will never close while powerful people profit from keeping it open.

And right now, too many of them do.

👉 Check out a collection of fiction novels that buck racial quotas