They'll Call It Racist

One will recall that on February 18, 2009, less than a month into Obama’s supposed “post-racial” presidency, Holder commemorated Black History Month by declaring the American people “essentially a nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “If we are to make progress in this area,” he piously intoned, “we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

This was so utterly, indisputably, laughingly wrong that those of us not reduced to outright mockery were left flabbergasted. Too little discussion of race? Race has long been our national obsession, a pastime more widely followed than football – which, in fact, itself regularly gives rise to mini-racial conflagrations – or Oprah (who’s never averse to fanning the conflagrations). Liberal commentators refuse to shut up about race; college students have it pushed in their faces from the first day of orientation on through to the de rigeur pieties about “diversity” and “social justice” at graduation; of necessity, most every Fortune 500 company has instituted policies aimed at hiring and promoting minorities, and woe be to recalcitrant managers who too adamantly adhere to more traditional standards of merit.

Seemingly each day we must endure some new illustration, large or small, of the ludicrous lengths to which this insanity has gone. Black Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon charges Pro Football Weekly with racism for describing (black) Auburn star Cam Newton as “very disingenuous” and “very scripted” with a “me-first” attitude – never mind that the publication had used exactly the same words to describe white players. According to the tabloids, “many” believed that ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ judge Mia Michaels was a racist, based on her decision to vote AdéChiké Torbert from the show. (Not to worry: a distraught Mia Michaels defended herself by revealing she has dated black men). Even the lunatic at a Connecticut beer distributorship who gunned down five co-workers after getting fired for theft cried racism, claiming he’d been subject to racist taunts.

As national obsessions go, this is quite a bizarre one, since most of us, left to our own devices, would prefer to take those we encounter in life as they come, on the merits; and, were it not for the fact that we are constantly being harangued about it by our progressive betters, in many cases we would scarcely notice race at all. Indeed, as Ann Coulter put it, in one of her more spot-on observations, “liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race.”

Happily, white supremacists have largely gone the way of the dodo.   Liberals, on the other hand, remain all-too-much with us, daily wielding the racism charge with all the subtlety of a caveman’s club.

For all the remarkable progress this country has made on race in the past half century, unprecedented in human history, liberals insist, for their own political and psychological purposes, on clinging to the notion of America as irredeemably racist. We – and especially black people – for too long have been living with the terrible consequences of that cruel canard.

One friend took me out to lunch to warn me off this book: it’s career suicide, he assured me, if not the regular kind. I’d get savaged, massacred – scalped, castrated, my body burned to such an unrecognizable crisp that no one but my dentist and that gorgeous forensic anthropologist on ‘Bones’ will be able to identify it. Hadn’t I noticed that in the Age of Obama, the racism charge, rather than abating, has become more prevalent than ever?

Yes, I’ve noticed.

I’ll confess, that did give me pause. So let me conclude, for safety’s sake, with a comment with which I wholeheartedly agree made by a reader called Extraneus  on the excellent JustOneMinute web site: “For the record, I have no problem with Obama’s black half. His white half is the most incompetent, anti-American asshole ever to inhabit the office of the presidency, but his black half is fine.”

Regarding No Matter What, They’ll Call This Book “Racist”: The ways in which this book will be anathema to the racial enforcers are many and varied. Start with double standards – the kind that may also be filed under ‘liberal white bigotry,’ i.e., the bigotry of low expectations, and how it cripples and demeans those it supposedly aims to help.  It will also look into the supposed sin of racial profiling—and the statistical evidence establishing that, in fact, the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates of minorities usually reflect nothing more than disproportionate rates of criminality. Too, it will discuss how American business has long been subject to blackmail by the racial grievance industry in the name of social justice; as well as the many other ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sowed division, corruption and resentment in this country.

Nor, speaking of double standards, can the role of the media be discounted in any of this. How is it okay for liberals to endlessly belittle Clarence Thomas as an Uncle Tom or for liberal cartoonist Ted Rall to get away with calling Condoleezza Rice a “house nigga?” Why, even after the Duke rape fiasco, does the media continue to give credence to every charge of racism?

But beyond the manifold particulars, I aim to make a larger and overarching point: the idea that it is racism that has millions of underclass blacks mired generation after generation in physical and spiritual poverty is not just false, but the greatest impediment to fundamentally altering that dreadful state of affairs. What must be faced – above all, by its victims – is that the real problem is a culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape.

Wish me luck.

There are of course deeply compelling reasons that as a subject race is the extremely sensitive and awkward thing it is. As the historians aptly have it, slavery was America’s “original sin,” and in the century to follow, even second class citizenship was a status denied most of the nation’s blacks. The very terminology associated with the era – “separate but equal,” “poll taxes,”  “lynchings” – bespeaks a nightmarish state of affairs all but incomprehensible to the contemporary mind. It is wonderfully good (and quite remarkable) that, though that time was so recent that tens of millions living today vividly recall it, we almost universally look back upon it with shame and even incredulity.

But shame is a psychologically complex thing, and never more so than when applied to Americans and race. For even as it has impelled us to examine our ugly past with unflinching honesty – with every elementary school kid nationwide versed in the horrors of the middle passage, and slave narratives all the rage with history grad students, and black oppression the leitmotif of every Ken Burns documentary – it has precluded anything approaching an honest view of race today; indeed, has much to do with why such honesty has itself been routinely cast as racist.

Haley-Barbour-pardons-Why-were-the-forgiven-so-disproportionately-white                   

Some thoughtful head-shaking from the Christian Science Monitor: You can click on the link above to read it all, but here’s a quote:

“Rather than relying on any kind of conscious bias, experts say, a pardon officer may        misread the level of remorse exhibited by a black pardon applicant for cultural reasons,         given that African-Americans may express contrition in different ways than whites.“To            the extent that [pardon boards] allow their staff to be making judgments into somebody’s attitude — that’s      an entry point for bias,”Jack Glaser, a discrimination expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told ProPublica.”

Right, the old “experts say” ploy — always particularly useful when the media cries racism.     And which “expert” is cited in the story?
“Jack Glaser, a discrimination expert at the University of California, Berkeley.” Any guess     what his political leanings might be? Speaking of which, ProPublica, the outfit that       generated this bilge, is itself notoriously left wing — not that that’s cited in the piece,            either. And mainstream media types still wonder why we so loathe them!

One reason we tea Party types just can’t warm to Mitt — aside from all the obvious policy and flip-flop-related reasons — is that he really cares about what the New York Times and the rest of the MSM SOBs think. And we despise those people, knowing how much they despise us and everything we believe in; and realize we’d all be a whole lot better off if they’d simply cease to exist. (I have friends who’d like to see certain MSM members strung up on lamp posts up and down Broadway, like the slaves at the end of ‘Sparacus,’ though I’m personally not prepared to go quite that far, (at least not in print). This is the reason that Newt elicits such a frenzied reaction, notwithstanding the obvious liabilities that come with being an essentially crummy human being: he gets it — and, more, seems to genuinely FEEL it — which at this juncture is so emotionally satisfying, it can supersede all else.

GREAT debate. No question, no one is better on the issues of race and poverty than Newt. No one grasps that these are more than just policy issues — they go to the heart of who we are as a people. And over the years he’s learned to stand up to — and now exploit — the smugly vicious conversation-killing liberal meme that daring to tell the truth about race is “racist”.  And he’s more willing to do that in desperation mode than he was even a month ago. The contrast with Romney here is especially striking. Can one even imagine Mitt taking on, for example, racial preference? And that’s not even factoring in the timidity on race born of the Mormonism problem.