The Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium hosted its sixth speaker of the year last week, Dinesh D'Souza, who discussed "The End of Racism."
D'Souza is a best selling author, conservative television commentator and former White House policy analyst who currently teaches at Stanford.
"I want to talk about the race debate, but I want to situate it in a discussion of how the world has shifted in the last 10 to 15 years," D'Souza said early on. "Today the race issue has been somewhat sidelined,"
He noted that race is still of significance, especially considering the war on terror.
D'Souza framed his discussion on race within three main shifts in recent years: the war on terror, the dominance of capitalism, and the shift in morality in the United States.
"We are now at a time when many people are wondering whether Islamic radicalism is replacing Soviet Union communism as the great threat," D'Souza said.
"There is also a shift in the economic debate because for the last 200 years capitalism has always had a major rival and now it doesn't,"
However, he said, "Capitalism has won the economic debate but not the moral debate. Capitalism is often criticized "not for inefficiency, but for being too efficient."
"Outsourcing is the most successful anti-poverty act in the whole world," said D'Souza. "Hundreds of thousands of people are being lifted out of poverty around the world, yet the "party of compassion' is against it."
The third shift he cited is a shift from "external moral order to the inner self. These three changes are the landscape where we discuss foreign policy," he said.
He warned against using the word "terror" as an excuse to categorize any group that is violent in the modern world. He claimed that the conflicts in Kashmir, Chechnya and Israel are wars of national identity that should not be dismissed by "shouting terrorists."
D'Souza called the battle against racism in America a "success story."
"The immigrant in Europe, for the most part, remains an outsider. By contrast, lots of people come to America, today mostly non-whites, and have become American.
"American identity is not a function of birthright but a way of life," D'Souza said. "That's why the term un-American makes sense."
D'Souza also attacked Jesse Jackson repeatedly, saying, "The African American leader Jesse Jackson judges America from the utopian standard." He said of liberals: "They never compare America to any other country but to the Garden of Eden."
Immigrants, on the other hand, he claimed, "compare America to their old country."
He was also very critical of the civil rights campaign for not embracing the theories of Booker T. Washington that advocated training African Americans and making sure they possess technical skills.
"What is the point of having the right to a job at Microsoft," D'Souza asked, "if you don't know how to program? If African Americans were not doing well in the 20s it was because of racism. Today, when African Americans are still not doing well, Jesse Jackson says that it must be because American is still racist."
D'Souza critized affirmative action as well: "Affirmative action was created for one group, the African American. Then a whole lot of people in the 60s and 70s showed up at the minority picnic and said, "we're the new blacks" and to get a majority these people banded together."
He then pointed out that other minorities have succeed, and then asked why those minorities are not the victims of the same racism Jackson has spoken of.
He did not claim a complete disappearance of racism from the American landscape, but that only "fifty, seventy, one hundred years ago, racism was systematic. Now it is episodic. The colorblind or race-neutral path is the only one that's going to work long term."
The next speaker on the MSE lineup will be CNN correspondent Bill Schneider on Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. in Shriver Hall.
