America is racist. This lesson is drummed into us through our schools and the mainstream media.

A century ago, much of the racism in America was aimed at blacks. Bigots condemned them as shiftless, lazy, and violent. These days, many on the left now target whites as evil, greedy, and privileged.

Both viewpoints are nakedly racist.

However you care to justify it, to call out, judge, and condemn people based solely on the color of their skin is pure and simple race hatred. It’s also completely irrelevant to the ongoing decline of the United States.

The collapse of our culture is killing our country, not skin pigmentation.

That thought first came to me while watching an online video of a brawl in a Texas Waffle House. There, we see a group of black customers throwing chairs and containers of sugar at employees, white and black. The customers were enraged because of slow service and because they were asked to remove themselves from a closed section of the restaurant. It would be easy to watch this fight and make a racial judgment. Instead, if we listen to the laughter and comments of the onlookers and observe the behavior of the women involved in this fracas, we realize that this vignette is one more small example of our destructive culture.

In “The Decline of Civility in African-American Culture,” Walter Williams quickly discards the notion that race is playing a part in the creation of our sordid contemporary society. Instead, he rightly pins the blame for this mess on the destruction of black families, the sharp decline in learning and education in our public schools, and, most of all, the relativism that stands today as the credo of American society. He writes:

“Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette are behavioral norms, transmitted mostly by example, word of mouth and religious teachings. As such, they represent a body of wisdom distilled through the ages by experience and trial and error. The nation’s liberals—along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts—have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. Many people have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what’s moral or immoral is a matter of personal convenience, personal opinion, what feels good or what is or is not criminal.”

As Walter Williams then states in his article, “The abandonment of traditional values has negatively affected the nation as a whole, but blacks have borne the greater burden.”

That this is true can be seen on any number of fronts. In our cities, many of them controlled for decades by liberal Democrats, blacks bear the brunt of crime, violence, and murder. A major contributor to this rise in lawlessness is the corresponding decline in the two-parent family. Today, Walter Williams tells us, only around 30 percent of black children live in an intact family.

The statistics in education are even worse. In “Many of America’s Black Youth Cannot Read or Do Math—And That Imperils Us All,” commentator and author Armstrong Williams recounts his interview with Winsome Sears, Virginia’s then candidate for lieutenant governor who eventually won that office. When Armstrong Williams asked Sears about problems facing Virginia, she pointed out that 84 percent of black eighth graders couldn’t do basic math and that 85 percent were functionally illiterate.

What explains these alarming statistics?

Our failed culture accounts for our current abysmal chaos. The traditional foundation stones of society—the family, the community, the schools—have long suffered neglect and abuse. Skyrocketing overdoses, widespread emotional illness, increased sexual confusion, government corruption, greater homelessness: These and so many more troubles stem from the long neglect of our fundamental institutions.

As Armstrong Williams notes, “If we continue on the same path of illiteracy and failing math grades, our country will not survive. Moreover, if we continue to focus on trivial social issues that have no impact on our country’s future, we will continue to neglect the real issues that we face.”

Reviving families, building strong communities, and retooling the curriculum of our schools are key to America’s well-being. If we do these things, we can bring light to our present darkness. If we do not, that night which is covering our land will only grow deeper.

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Image credit: Bring Me The News-Andy Swenson

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